Miguel Harte

Buenos Aires, Argentina,  1961

            Established as one of the foremost artistic figures of his generation, Miguel Harte's trajectory is punctuated by an exuberant imagination and an instinct devoted to the incessant creation of worlds. Paradigmatic and unavoidable, his work suspends what we call reality to shape a singular, self-contained, and consistent universe, populated by beings that, while distancing themselves from us, seem to be an oblique portrait of the artist and his environment. Self-taught and expressionist, nurtured in the sensibility of a family integrated into the local art world of the 1960s and 1970s, his early oil paintings were exhibited in Brazil, where he lived for several years during the 1980s, and later in Buenos Aires.

            Integrated into the local scene, alongside Pablo Suárez and Marcelo Pombo, with whom he functioned practically as an artistic trio, his production participated in the mythical world of the Centro Cultural Rojas and synthesized many of the characteristics that identify it: a love for art as play, a baroque passion for ornamentation and bricolage, and an amateur ethic linked to the laying of circuits and networks of work, exhibition, and management. With "Accidente doméstico," he won the First Prize for Sculpture at the Fortabat Salon, organized at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires. And in the early 2000s, he began to expand his ecosystems, leaning towards large formats. In 2003, his anthological exhibition "Miguel Harte" was celebrated at the National Museum of Fine Arts, definitively consecrating him.

            When Harte's brilliant graphic world expanded into space with the inclusion and production of objects, his work managed to stand out from its context. Thus, a set of stylistic marks singularize him: the use of styrofoam and papier-mâché, initially, and his polished surfaces of formica, the sculptural and plastic work of resin, the soft nacreous planes produced by the action of industrial paints, afterwards. At the same time, the bubble and the spill as a mode of configuring his own cosmos became the home of humanoid creatures, supernatural species, a true cross between the microscopic realm of insects and the world that forever linked him to entomology. In this sense, each of Harte's interventions recalls the power of deformation as a method. His works are simultaneously neat and grotesque, detailed and explosive.