Rocking the art world at 80

AT 80, Marta Minujín is still as stylishly bold as her art has been over her long career. She fashions platinum blonde hair and signature bangs. Aviator sunglasses usually cover her eyes; bold rings cover her fingers. Her ultra-colourful jumpsuits are an extension of her art, as if she is wearing a live piece of the striped mattresses and paintings that have become synonymous with her name.

A Buenos Aires, Argentina, native born to a prominent Russian-Jewish family in 1943, Minujín began her career in the late 1950s.

During the 1960s she experimented with mattresses, creating biomorphic soft sculptures, painted in striped patterns with fluorescent colours, which became her signature style. Each was a different iteration: some were small; others one could crawl inside; some referenced the body, which evoked intimacy, play, even eroticism.

“Half of your life takes place on a mattress. You are born; you die; you make love; you can get killed on the mattress,” said Minujín, during a recent interview with Rebecca Shaykin, associate curator at the Jewish Museum in New York, who is the co-curator of a project that will highlight the artist this year. “That’s why mattresses are so important. I started with mattresses in the ’60s, but then I stopped for 40 years, and then I started again in 2007. I went back to my roots.”

Minujín is not the only one returning to her origins. For the first time in her expansive 60-year career, she and her work will be honoured in a stand-alone show at the Jewish Museum, in Marta Minujín: Arte! Arte! Arte!, from Nov 17 to March 31.

The exhibit will showcase nearly 100 works from the artist’s archives along with private and institutional collections, including her mattress-based soft sculptures, fluorescent large-scale paintings, psychedelic drawings and performances, and rarely seen photographs and film footage.

“There’s a deep frustration that a generation of women artists have been overlooked. Marta is one of them,” said Shaykin, 38. “As curators, we have an obligation and a commitment to bring unheard, unrecognised or underrepresented artists into the discussion.”

For six decades, Minujín has created large-scale, politically playful art, purposely placed in experiential settings. In 1965, while travelling in a helicopter, she dropped live chickens and lettuce on an audience below that had gathered in a football field. In 2015, she mobilised people on a bridge in Buenos Aires and released flower petals in an attempt to create instant soul mates on a massive scale. Those events often forced the viewer not only to encounter the art, but also to become part of the experience itself.

Though considered one of Argentina’s most recognised and celebrated creative people, who collaborated with American and French avant-garde colleagues like Niki de Saint Phalle, Christo, Charlotte Moorman, Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol, she has remained an overlooked and unknown name in the United States.

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That fact is one more reason “this is a long overdue show for a female artist who is a defining force with a distinctive hallmark in Latin American art”, said Darsie Alexander, 57, the acting director and the Susan and Elihu Rose chief curator at the museum. “In addition to being a woman artist coming into her own at the same age as Warhol and Rauschenberg in this generational milieu, Marta’s work never quite sat within the popular market driven trends.”

The Jewish Museum, on the Upper East Side in Manhattan, has always focused on celebrating women artists. Over the past decade its monographic exhibitions have featured Barbara Bloom, Rachel Feinstein, Martha Rosler, Laurie Simmons and Florine Stettheimer. Minujín will be their first female Jewish and Latin American artist profiled.

The exhibition will also be the museum’s first bilingual show. “We hope that will bring in a Spanish-speaking audience and an audience that is more familiar with Marta but less familiar with the museum,” Shaykin said.