Nicolás García Uriburu
Buenos Aires, Argentina 1937 – 2016
His first steps as a land art artist were not entirely conscious. It was June 1968 and García Uriburu was informally participating in the Venice Biennale. May 68 with its slogan "All Power to the Imagination" prompted him to throw into the Grand Canal a substance from a boat that green stained the city's waters for twelve hours and showed its state of contamination. That particular green would become his trademark. Far from the pop art he had explored so far, he inaugurated an art where the support of the work was no longer the canvas but the landscape.
This artistic action, almost criminal, was photographed by his friend, the art critic Pierre Restany, generating a great media impact. As a prelude to the green parties that later emerged in Europe, his aesthetic-political intervention founded a new type of art and ecological activism. But this was only the first in a series of avant-garde actions. Through his work Hidrocromía Intercontinental –four cities in two continents dyed green as in Venice– he built a sort of hymn in defense of polluted waters. In 1981, in collaboration with the German artist Joseph Beuys, he colored the waters of the Rhine River, an experience he captured in the work Rhein Akion. These are just a few examples and he is one of the many artists who left the galleries and created in nature, but the difference was, as he used to say, that he cared about the planet. He was the only environmentalist among all the land artists.
What followed concerned something that already pulsed in him, a consequence of his interest in Latin America and pre-Columbian art collections. A work with maps flipped over: the south was above the countries of the northern hemisphere, symbolically limiting the colonialism of the places that always dominated; the Utopia of the South. And once again, nature emerged from those maps, uniting the countries through their rivers and vegetation, "united and not disunited by the hand of man," explained the artist.