The Argentine museum celebrates 25 years by acquiring 1,000 works of Latin American

MALBA: The Argentine museum celebrates 25 years by acquiring 1,000 works of Latin American art

Looking back over the 25-year history of the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (MALBA), and even before, when Argentine businessman Eduardo Costantini began building his art collection in 1982, a succession of milestones emerges, each related to the acquisition of a masterpiece of Latin American art.

In the galleries of the Argentine museum, which will celebrate its 25th anniversary in September 2026, great paintings and sculptures are displayed, distinguished by their artist, the era in which they were created, their significance for a country, their innovative elements, or their meanings.

In 1995, for example, the collection acquired two paintings by great Latin American women artists: “Abaporu,” by the Brazilian Tarsila do Amaral, the most important figure of modernism in her country; and “Self-Portrait with Monkey and Parrot,” by Frida Kahlo, for which the Argentine businessman and collector paid $3.2 million at the time. This figure is ten times smaller than the $34.9 million he himself paid in 2021 for the Mexican artist's self-portrait, “Diego and I,” which is now another of the MALBA's major landmark works.

These iconic pieces make it possible to conceive dialogues in the MALBA galleries that would be impossible elsewhere, for example, around the festive Latin American culture that, in the early decades of the 20th century, was represented almost simultaneously by Diego Rivera with his “Dance of Tehuantepec” and Cândido Portinari with “Festa de São João” in Brazil; or the approaches to identity proposed from different latitudes in the late 1920s by the Colombian Rómulo Rozo with “Bachué” and Tarsila do Amaral with “Abaporu”; or the return to inner worlds, as seen in the self-portraits of Frida Kahlo and the Spanish artist based in Mexico, Remedios Varo, with “Harmony.”