about
Miguel Harte (Buenos Aires, 1961) emerged as an artist in the mid-1980s under the tutelage of artist Pablo Suarez -a friend of his family-. He then became a key member of the influential art scene that developed between that decade and the following one around the Rojas Cultural Center Gallery, participating in the iconic 1989 exhibition, Harte-Pombo-Suarez.
During the course of the 1990s he found a language and a materiality of his own, that does not place him squarely in any generic art movement, but in a locus as a unique artist, whose work has resisted the immediate definition of curators and art historians. His artistic practice has been approached through concepts such as viscerality, mutant biology, science fiction, sexual metaphors, the grotesque, the abject, the cosmic or the microscopic. International curator Gabriel Pérez Barreiro has written about this artist: “Although several lineages can be established for Harte’s work within the rich and obscure traditions of Argentine art, we can say that he is a singular artist“.
Harte´s work has been characterized by complex and impeccable production processes, using industrial materials and techniques such as car body paint, which he ductilely twists for his artistic purposes. This exhibition brings together a series of rarely seen works, made between 2006 and 2022. This selection highlights the formal and poetic power of the works in order to shift their reading from the usual emphasis on the grotesque, while underlining their current relevance as images of a distorted nature in the process of mutation due to the effects of human activities, a very visible and hot topic on a global scale during the last few months.
Miguel Harte has an extensive trajectory of exhibitions and awards. Among the most important institutional exhibitions are Como una piedra que sueña, his retrospective at the Amalita Collection in 2022 and his solo show at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in 2003. His work has also been exhibited at Bienal Sur; Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires; Fundación OSDE; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Bogotá, among other institutions. Among the 16 awards he has received in Argentina are the First Prize Fundación Federico Klemm in 2002; the Gran Premio Bicentenario, Museo Timoteo Navarro, Tucumán, in 2016; the Konex Platinum Prize in 2012; the First Prize Fundación Andreani in 2011; and the Premio Premio Fortabat Escultura in 1999.
Miguel Harte has received many art awards in Argentina, including the Bicentennial Grand Prize, the Platinum Konex Award 2012; the First Prize Andreani Foundation 2011; the First Prize Klemm Foundation 2008; First Prize Sculpture, Fortabat Award; Artist of the Year, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, 1999 and the Baron de Ramefort Award, “To the Most Promising Young Artist of 1990”.
He has had numerous solo exhibitions, among them at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Bogotá, MAC in 1986, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires in 2003 and the recent anthological exhibition at the Museo Colección Amalia de Fortabat in 2022.
His works are in the collections of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Museo Castagnino-MACRO, Rosario, Colección Fortabat and Blanton Museum, TX, USA, among others.