Manuel Espinosa
(Buenos Aires, 1912 - 2006)
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Concrete Art in Argentina
Manuel Espinosa
 
Born in Buenos Aires in 1912, he attended the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes and the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes Ernesto de la Carcova.
After a brief surrealist stage, he was a charter member of the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención. He signed the Inventionist Manifesto and participated in the exhibitions the group had in 1946 - at the Salon Peuser in March; at the Centre of Graduated Professors of Secondary Teaching in September; at the Sociedad Argentina de Artistas Plásticos (Argentine Society of Plastic Artists,  SAAP) in October; and at the Ateneo Popular de La Boca in the same month.
Afterwards his work maintained a geometric abstraction characterized by the repetition of squares or circles within the composition. On this sequential disposition he worked with shades, overlappings and displacements, that allowed him to incorporate spatial relations of advance and backward movements.
He took part in collective exhibitions as Del arte concreto a la nueva tendencia (From Concrete Art to New Tendency), Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires (1963); Más allá de la geometría (Beyond Geometry), Instituto Torcuato Di Tella (1967); Salon Camparaison, Paris (1967), Veinticinco artistas argentinos (Twenty-five Argentinean Artists), Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires (1970); International Biennial Exhibition of Cagnes-sur-Mer, France (1970); Projection and Dynamics, Museum of Modern Art, Ville of Paris (1973); Tendencias actuales del arte argentino (Present Tendencies of Argentine Art), Artistic Centre of International Encounters, Nice, France (1974), among others.
In the 80s he took part in the exhibitions of the tendency named “abstracción sensible” (Sensible Abstraction), among them, Geometría 81 hosted by the Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes, La Plata. In the city of Buenos Aires he took part in La geometría. Homenaje a Max Bill (Geometry, A Tribute to Max Bill), hosted by the Centro  deArte y Comunicación; La abstracción sensible (The Sensible Abstraction), an exhibition complementing the Jornadas de la Crítica (Critic Workshop) held in 1981; and Del Constructivismo a la geometría sensible (From Constructivism to Sensible Geometry), hosted by Harrods in May 1992, among others.
Espinosa took part in the main exhibitions dealing with the development of the abstraction in the Rio de la Plata, among them Homenaje a la vanguardia argentina de la década del ’40 (ATribute to the Argentine Avant-garde of the 40s), hosted by Galería Arte Nuevo (1976); Vanguardias de la década del ’40. Arte Concreto-Invención. Arte Madí. Perceptismo (Vanguards of the Decade of the '40, Arte Concreto-Invención 1945, Madí Art, Perceptismo), at the Museo Eduardo Sivori (1980); and the more recent one, Abstract Art from the Rio de la Plata, Buenos Aires and Montevideo 1933/53, at The Americas Society of New York (2001).
The Museo Juan B. Castagnino, Rosario, hosted a tribute exhibition of his works in 2001.
He died in Buenos Aires in January 24, 2006.