Alfredo Londaibere (Buenos Aires, 1955-2017) believed painting could concentrate all an artist’s capacity for expression and all the truth about art. Painting represented his language, his economy and his field of action. He explored it from multiple perspectives through his different roles as artist, curator and teacher, within a system of work centered on the craft and at the
same time on the history of art.

In his works converge classical European art, primitive Christianity, baroque colonial painting, pagan, Catholic and Afro-descendant beliefs, central and peripheral modernisms, East and West, the avant-garde and local appropriations, the craft system and the erudite arts, elite culture and popular consumption. Painting offered him a field of investigation that he explored by means of diverse techniques and materialities with which he revisited traditional genres and, at the same time, it became a tool to reach a spiritual state that became increasingly explicit in his themes, his procedures and his vision of the world. In his paintings, in his assemblages and in his collages, he configured a meditative way of doing, centered on aesthetic enjoyment.

He was trained in the workshops of Araceli Vázquez Málaga, Oscar Smöje and the Asociación Estímulo de Bellas Artes. Since the eighties he produced work systematically, in series. In 1985 he joined the Gay Action Group (GAG), with which he shared readings on social theory, micropolitical activism and a sociability that brought him closer to Jorge Gumier Maier and Marcelo Pombo. Towards the end of that decade he attended the art clinics of Luis Wells and Kenneth Kemble and Pablo Suárez, who encouraged him to direct his production towards collage.

Some of his works began to circulate in the Buenos Aires underground scene of that time: he participated in exhibitions at Cemento and at the Singapore Sling gallery. He was part of the group of artists linked to the art gallery of the Ricardo Rojas Cultural Center since Gumier Maier founded it in 1989. That year he presented his first individual exhibition there, Mapas y pinturas, which he considered a “retrospective”. In 1991 he participated in the “Kuitca Scholarship”, directed by Guillermo Kuitca, whose assistant he would later become. That year he exhibited again at the Rojas and did so for the third and last time the following year, when he also began to teach visual arts.

Together with Gumier, Maier, Omar Schiliro and Benito Laren, in 1992 he participated in an exhibition at the Giesso space, where he exhibited a series of male nudes on boards, outlining an aesthetic charged with senses linked to sexuality. The critic Jorge Lopez Anaya dedicated to the exhibition the review “El absurdo y la ficción en una notable muestra”, published in La Nacion, “in which he established an analogy between the works and certain contemporary symptoms associated with postmodernity such as lightness and fiction. From then on, a controversy was generated about the notion of lightness associated with this group of artists and that was extended to all those who participated in the Rojas scene” -summarizes art historian Jimena Ferreiro-.

In 1994 he had a solo exhibition at the Mun Gallery, curated by Sonia Becce. In 1996 he exhibited with Benito Laren at the Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana (ICI). That same year he was selected to participate in the Taller de Barracas with the support of Antorchas and under the direction of Luis Benedit and Pablo Suarez. Curated by Becce, he presented his
series “10 Coronas de poder” at the Alianza Francesa in 1998. In 1999 he exhibited Témperas autobiográficas at Galería Gara. In 2000 and 2002 he had two exhibitions at Belleza y Felicidad, the art gallery, bookstore and neighborhood cultural center founded by Fernanda Laguna and Cecilia Pavon, “which became the natural heir of the Rojas” (Ferreiro). At the Rojas Center, meanwhile, she took over the direction of the exhibition space when Gumier decided to step aside from the management from 1997 to 2002.

He studied ceramic and wax modeling in the workshops of Carlos Kurten, Antonio Pujía and Taca Oliva. He produced sculptures, which he exhibited in 2005 together with paintings by Florencia Bohtlingk at the Centro Cultural Borges, in an exhibition curated by Fernanda Laguna. These works accompanied his works from the early 2000s, a period in which Ferreiro
observes the predominance of “a more direct gesture”, works with which the artist felt he was beginning to paint for the first time.

Among numerous other exhibitions, it is worth mentioning his participation with a series of tempera on lithographs and vintage printed paper in the cycle “The artist as curator”, at the Centro Cultural San Martín, invited by Laura Batkis and in the group show 2D (both, 2005), curated by María Eugenia Spinelli at the Centro Cultural Parque de España in Rosario. He
also exhibited at Centro Cultural Recoleta, Ivy Marey / Tierra sin Mal (2009); at Galería Jardín oculto, Flores y frutos (2012) and at Galería Nora Fisch, Pinturas y collages (2015). Londaibere was awarded in 2015 with the First Painting Prize of the Central Bank of the Argentine Republic, the First Prize Andreani Foundation and the Second Prize of the 10th National Competition UADE of Visual Arts.
In 2019, Jimena Ferreiro curated Yo soy santo, the first panoramic exhibition of her work, for the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires. The same year, Nora Fisch Gallery dedicated the exhibition Bienvenida primavera to him and in 2022 organized Colección Londaibere / El artista como curador, a two-stage show with works from the artist’s personal collection, also curated by Ferreiro, which included early and iconic pieces from the production of several of the artists of her generation and from the Rojas Center circle.