Nicolás García Uriburu

A central figure in the Argentinean art scene and a promoter of Land Art also at the international level, Nicolás García-Uriburu (Buenos Aires, 1937-2016) developed a rich body of work that included actions and performances, body art, and oils on canvas—centered on local myths and archetypes—drawings, mixed media, objects, photographs, installations and videos. For the most part his works focused on nature and the geopolitical elements that surround it. In 1971, García-Uriburu did three colorations that referenced his body. Referring to them in a conversation that he and I had years ago, he said: "I painted the sex (allegory of life), the face (the personification of perception), and the hair (symbol of thought, of the brain) green." García-Uriburu was one of the first artists in the world to perform a large scale action on nature by dyeing a three kilometer section of the Grand Canal in Venice, during the Venice Biennale, using non-toxic bright green fluorescent sodium. Uriburu chose the green color (ten years before the "green" parties adopted it) and studied the tides and movements of the waters. This intervention—which metaphorically attempted to purify the water through color—was his first gesture against pollution. About his connection with monumental Land Art, García-Uriburu affirmed that his intervention in Venice foreshadowed it. "I completed it on June 20, 1968, a year before Christo's 1969 action in the coast of Australia." This conceptually-charged work paved the way to García's more than 40 actions, colorations, national and international reforestations, conservation manifestos, the defense of the architectural heritage. He regarded his direct interventions of nature as one of the central languages of his ecologically-centered work. An architect by trade who presented his first exhibition in 1954, in recent decades he decided that it was time to "favor ethics and solidarity over aesthetics." He dyed rivers and fountains in European capitals, Argentina and Brazil. In 1982, he even collaborated with legendary and irreverent German artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) in the planting of 7,000 oak trees in Kassel (Germany), as part of the 7th edition of the Documenta exhibition. Then, during the 1970s and 1980s, García planted more than 50,000 trees—with a group of collaborators—in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Maldonado (Uruguay). The last dye he did was in 2010, in Buenos Aires, to mark the bicentennial of the Argentinean nation. It was an intervention of the Riachuelo River, a place that he had intervened before—along with other Argentinean rivers and streams—with several types of signs during the late 1990s, when he denounced the pollution caused by the improperly treated toxic waste discarded by industrial businesses. In 2010, in the manner of a hopeful protest in collaboration with Greenpeace, he intervened the section of the Riachuelo River located in La Boca neighborhood with a stunning dye. The work was conceived to call attention to the environmental impact of pollution on the river's basin and as reminder of the 200-year old broken promises to conserve it. After the establishment in the area of the first saladeros [an industry that produces salted meat], slaughterhouses and tanneries along the river's bank, the members of the First Triumvirate announced (in 1811) a short term plan to sanitize the waters, a promise that has not been fulfilled to this day. In fact, his 1999 exhibition titled "Polluting Companies Sponsor…" was more than a photographic show. The digitally reproduced images intervened with green color, were exhibited to denounce the poisoning of public water. García-Uriburu uncovered and denounced nine industrial companies that threw toxic waste into Argen...