Edgardo Antonio VIGO: Un arte a realizar [An art in becoming]

Richard Saltoun Gallery presents the first solo exhibition in the UK dedicated to Argentinian artist Edgardo Antonio VIGO, a pivotal figure of the '60s and '70s South American avant-garde and  the subject of an exhibition at MoMA, New York in 2014.

Argentinian artist Edgardo Antonio Vigo (1928–1997) was born (and died) in the small city of La Plata, a few kilometres away from Buenos Aries. Despite never leaving La Plata, he is recognised internationally as the founder of mail art in Argentina. Touching on the fields of performance, sculpture, mail art, and land art, he was at the epicentre of a truly international network of artists and poets. Vigo’s commitment to radical forms of poetry manifested itself in the periodicals Diagonal Cero and Revista Hexa’gono, of which he was editor, and became an important vehicle for social and political critique in Argentina. 

Vigo's son, Abel Luis, was 'disappeared' under the military junta in 1976 and from that point on his work became more explicitly political. Using humour and irony as the means to recount the everyday life of 'the South American ghetto', and the international mail network as his form of communication, Vigo quietly revolutionised the way in which artists spread their work and message in Latin America.

The exhibition at Richard Saltoun Gallery features a selection of artworks, multiples, magazines and performance documents spanning Vigo’s entire life: from original photographs of his early 'useless machines'; to his prints, multiples and mail art commenting on the social and political system; and the stand-out sculptural work Poemas Matematicos(In)Comestibiles (1968) made out of two welded aluminium sardine cans - this exhibition gives a taste of Vigo’s quizzical presentation of art as a riddle to be solved by spectators who are turned into active creators.