Madrid,
He only lived thirty-four years, but Alberto Greco dedicated them intensely to claiming, both in Argentina and in Europe, the possibility and validity of a living art beyond walls and disciplines: he affirmed, with actions and words, that the only border between what we could consider creation and what is not is found in the artist’s gaze.
Sixty years after his death in Barcelona, the Reina Sofía Museum dedicates to this author the exhibition “Long live art”, in which his ideas that are difficult to categorize, the many ways he sought to materialize them between 1949 and 1965, and documentation linked to his multiple street actions and theatrical proposals, aimed at the crowd and almost always controversial, come to our attention.
This exhibition was curated by Fernando Davis, who pointed out yesterday that in that brief and hasty career Greco mobilized minority sensibilities (he appealed to the childish, the cheesy, the abject), he underlined the potential of the extemporaneous and the countermovement against stable paths, he opened himself to street wandering and bad writing and constructed a fiction of himself and his actions in accordance with strategies that he himself referred to as self-propaganda.
The exhibition, articulated as a retrospective, necessarily, with multiple detours, focuses on how his journey – in his case, it is impossible to speak of a career – was nomadic and experiential, and distant from the usual parameters of authorship and artistic exhibition. His own life, wandering and materially precarious, was his field of experimentation and also of exhibition.
“Long live art” begins by remembering his first steps in Buenos Aires: there he joined groups of poets and writers that included Gómez de la Serna, Manuel Mujica Lainez and María Elena Walsh. He trained in Fine Arts, his references were Cecilia Marcovich and Tomás Maldonado, and even then his work began to be influenced by writing, from which he would no longer detach himself.
In 1954 he traveled to Paris for the first time, where the following year he exhibited works linked to a lyrical and tachist abstraction; Under that name of tachista he presented himself in Buenos Aires and in São Paulo. At the same time that he cultivated those aesthetics that contradicted the adult-centric aspect of the avant-garde, he became involved in temporary rolling exhibitions aimed at the Argentine popular classes; These trips would prove vital in his later work, as they laid the foundations for the links with the community that he always maintained and his fascination with folklore.
At the Reina Sofía we will see some of those early canvases close to informalism, one that he described as terrible, strong and aggressive against good customs: they were born from violent action on matter with hands and feet, and also with fluids: Alberto Greco conceived these compositions as potentially organic living bodies, susceptible to being transformed (anticipating his manifesto, as living art). In addition to oil and enamel, he applied sand, sawdust and urine to these compositions, and he was one of the first authors to let the inclement weather leave its mark on the images.
It is not strange that the next step in this saturation of the material, and in its love for the unforeseen and the life that makes its way, was the abandonment of the frame to find at street level a movement that the canvases could no longer contain. Just beginning the sixties, Greco wallpapered the city of Buenos Aires with advertising posters in which he praised himself from an ironic point of view: How great you are! either The most important informalist painter in America. They were strategies, in a certain way, of self-invention: of the construction of one’s own figure for the public space. The street was his space of direct address to the viewer, to all viewers.
Back in Paris, in 1962, he presented his first street exhibition: René Bertholo photographed him drawing a circle with chalk around the artist Alberto Heredia, marking him as a work of art. There he contacted Marta Minujín, Leonor Fini and her circle, with European authors such as Arman, Yves Klein or Christo or with the gallery owner Pierre Restany, to whom he proposed an exhibition side by side with homeless people. The idea was not accepted.
That same year, already in Genoa, the Argentine formulated his Manifesto finger of living art; Its title refers to the belief that the artist no longer had to express his messages with his own pieces, but rather had to point, show with his finger what deserved attention. And that that is anything but restricted: it goes through situations, movements, smells, conversations. Unlike Duchamp’s readymades, Greco did not see it necessary to transfer what he understood as works of art to museums; among other things, because there was no room for their events in the rooms.
Basically, it was his notion of living art that forced him to leave Italy: he programmed in Trastevere a work of theatrical experimentation and biblical and literary inspiration (Joyce, Genet), eschatological and sacrilegious, which the media baptized as a delirious stage orgy. The police already intervened at its premiere.
He then settled in Madrid. The Argentine Adolfo Estrada, then in the capital, offered him his studio and showed his drawings to the Biosca gallery, where in turn he would contact the members of the El Paso group, at that time already dissolved. With some, we will see it at the Reina Sofía, he established collaborations while continuing to extend his living and street art: he built objects together with Manolo Millares and the Kennedy assassination inspired a mortuary project that he developed with Antonio Saura.
In the summer of 1963 he made his first contact with Piedralaves (Ávila), where he would settle for several months, actively participating in community life and becoming its cultural animator. In this town, which he proposed as the international capital of Greekismsigned sites as works of art – this is also how he considered its inhabitants – and displayed, literally in its streets, another extensive manifesto of living art, about three hundred meters long: letters, recipes, fragments of conversations, stories, allusions to raffles were interwoven in its text.
What is preserved of him has been displayed in a showcase at the MNCARS along with documentation related to another of his most popular actions in Spain: a collective subway trip from Sol to Lavapiés that culminated in painting a canvas in a corrala; a cloth that he then set on fire. It was an adventure with no other objective than the break with what was expected in that disciplined or regulated space that is the street.
In parallel, Greco carried out drawings and collages based on additions and superimpositions, some with illegible calligraphy; We can read them as visual translations of their multiple wanderings. There was still some revolutionary gesture to come: in 1964, in the recently opened Juana Mordó gallery, he incorporated living characters into his paintings, lottery or pipe sellers whom he described as characters influencing the theatrical nature of life (the true work).
Nothing inert or planned should have a place in it, but self-propaganda was still viable, incorporating its name in commercial advertisements of all kinds or in self-referential collages. The Argentine artist committed suicide in Barcelona in 1965, an act that some have understood as art, taking his conception of creation to its ultimate consequences, but which we have no documentary reasons to qualify as such. As we said, he was not yet thirty-five.
Alberto Greco. “Long live living art”
NATIONAL MUSEUM REINA SOFÍA ART CENTER. MNCARS
C/ Santa Isabel, 52
Madrid
From February 11 to June 8, 2026
