Alberto Heredia (sculptor)

Alberto Heredia (1924–2000) was a 'self-taught' painter and sculptor from Argentina. His mainly expressionistic work encompassed themes of the human condition regarding consumption and power. Through use of garbage and found objects assembled into sculptures, he created narratives of consumerism and censorship that he found plagued Argentina. Heredia’s work expresses loneliness, love and death and shares with us his view of exasperated existence.
== Early life ==
Alberto Carlos Heredia was born in the city of Buenos Aires on March 4, 1924. He was the first-born of four siblings. His father Hector Heredia was a merchant, and his mother Margarita Matilde Tramullas was the daughter of a Spanish family that had first emigrated to France and later to Argentina in 1916. His Spanish ancestry comes to him through his mother's side, with which he identifies deeply within his life and his art. He had a religious and protective upbringing thanks to his mother but was extremely affected by the dramatic death of his father. His father was an authoritarian figure and gambler, and although his death was labeled an 'accident', the artist's memories reconstruct a violent death, probably related to gambling debts. Alberto Heredia passed away in the same city he was born in at the age of 76 in 2000.
== Training and influences ==
At the age of 21 (1945), Alberto Heredia enrolled at the National School of Ceramics. He was there briefly before enrolling in the workshops of the National School of Bellas Artes where he met Horacio Juarez, who became his first sculpture professor and mentor. There Heredia studied works by great classical artists including Michelangelo, Heredia claimed not to subscribe to the regular academic life and was subsequently expelled from the school within a year. Heredia continued to stay in contact with Juarez but maintained the idea that he was a self-taught artist.
As his art evolved, some of the influences he attributed to his success included writings by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, existentialists such as Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, and thinkers such as Jose Ortega and Gasset. He also claimed to be influenced by abstract artists like Kosice, and the avant-garde movement. He later became friends with Alberto Greco who influenced how he viewed art and life, and they would go out to perform vivo dito works together in Paris.
== Career ==
After Heredia’s expulsion from the National School of Ceramics in 1945, he continued to make sculptures. Most of the work that Heredia was producing from 1945 to 1948 remained figurative and expressionistic. There is very little evidence of Heredia’s early figurative work because in 1948 he entered the international art scene after becoming acquainted with the Concreto-Invención group in Buenos Aires. This progression led him to fully renounce his earlier beginning period of expressionistic figurative art. Not long after this he became immersed in abstraction and its freedom, subsequently abandoning figurative sculpture or modeling and destroying most of his early figurative work. He developed his own technique of crafting art out of garbage materials and finding the expressive qualities of the trash that he used in a way that made sense to his work.
After the fall of the Perón regime in 1955, Heredia made art that reacted to the subsequent modernization and industrialization of Argentina. His new abstract works culminated in his first solo exhibition at the Galatea Gallery in Buenos Aires in 1960. The Camembert Boxes (1962) remains one of Heredia’s better-known works which sums up this era of Heredia’s career nicely by outright rejecting spectator participation and exploring the aesthetics of residual objects.
Heredia’s art continued into the political realm. Through his art he spoke out against consumerism, censorship, and crime that was going on in Argentina through the 60s and 70s. He made the Engendros (Spawn) series as a response to censorship issues in Argentina. Much of his other work in the 70s was marked by the fury and pain of contained violence that censorship imposed on people. This came in the forms of dental prosthesis, tongues, and gags which regularly made appearance in Heredia’s work. In many ways, his work in the late 60s and early 70s prophesied the years of terror that Argentina experienced in the Dirty War which continued into the 1980s.
After a devastating fall from a horse in 1963, Heredia underwent multiple surgeries that had him immobile and covered in various plasters for two years. This was a very dark time in Heredia’s life and from then on, he became a bit obsessed with plastering things and obsessively wrapping objects in his art which ultimately shifted his making process. One of the biggest years in Heredia’s life was 1974. His Amordazamientos (Gaggings) series continued his theme of censorship and was presented in several exhibitions within this year. Along with the series, he publicly denounced the violence and atrocities taking place in Argentina at the time at the Art System’s in Latin America show at the Institution of Contemporary Arts in London. This garnered some negative attention from Perón’s Triple A (Argentine Anticommunist Alliance) who in December of 1974 sentenced Heredia to death. He was then forced into hiding for two months in Uruguay, and upon his return to Buenos Aires he took a step away from direct political involvement and revised his productions since 1960 which ended with him casting several of his earlier works in bronze.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s Heredia produced his Silver Series where he made mixed media sculptures painted in silver which marked his switch back to commentary on consumption. This era of work was quite cynical of how the modern person was inseparable from objects and in his eyes, this symbolized the deterioration of values and the decline of society. Throughout the 80s and 90s he made work that reiterated the idea of denouncing power. He continued to speak out against Argentina’s government and rulers with his series of “thrones” (1984) which consisted of throne-like structures placed on pedestals which questioned the role of authority and reduced positions of power. Through the 90s he continued to make sculptures in the same vein which explored society, power, objects, and their shortcomings. In some of his last works before his death in 2000, Heredia dismantled objects to modify the original meaning of it.
== Artwork and ideas ==
Alberto Heredia is best known for his "Cajas de Camembert" (Camembert Boxes) series which was finished in 1962. The name comes from the cheese boxes where he keeps the photos of children and men, baby dolls, bones, hair, and various other garbage. This series of artworks consists of mixed media with the underlying idea of life worked into them. In Heredia’s own words about this series, “I was looking for my own means of expression, an intimate medium, a personal medium. I dreamed and discovered my worlds: sex, religion, life and death. Camembert boxes begins in life and death. He will come down with debris, with traces of memory, always keeping the material in a primitive and wild state without danger of craft.” In this way, Camembert Boxes conveys a life cycle from birth to death and everything in between by including the various gragments of life via the things we throw away. Curator Carlos Basualdo has noted that in much of Heredia's later work with detritus the artist had “a coherent esthetic exploration of the residual: the wretchedness of materials and the wretchedness of the contents that those materials are forced to express.” After the Camembert Boxes, Heredia’s work consisted almost exclusively of detritus arranged in different ways. Eventually he moved from the exploration of objects and their relationship to an overarching theme of consumption.
== List of exhibitions ==
* 1967, “Surrealism in Argentina”, Instituto Torcuato Di Tella
* 1971, “The Artist and the World of Consumption”, Carmen Gallery
* 1971, “Useful and Useless Objects”, Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires
* 1972, “Artist Award Salon with Acrilicopaolini III”, Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires
* 1974, “Art System’s in Latin America”, Institute of Contemporary Arts in London
* 1978, “Alberto Heredia”, Balmaceda Gallery in Buenos Aires
* 1979, “Postfiguration, curated by Jorge Glusberg”, Center for Art and Communication
* 1992-1993, “Latin American Artists of the 20th Century”, (traveling show)
== List of works ==
* La Estaca, 1960, mixed media
* Camembert Boxes, 1962, mixed media
* El Filmador, 1967, film
* El Tunel, 1971, immersive mixed media
* Engendro, 1972, mixed media
* Sandwich homus, 1972, mixed media
* Melba Cups, 1975, mixed media
* Anclada, 1978, mixed media
* Jean, 1984, mixed media
* Niños enveueltos a la Heredia, 1980, film
* Macho Tango, 1988, mixed media
 
Category:1924 births
Category:2000 deaths
Category:Argentine painters 
Category:Argentine sculptors