Marta Minujin

Marta Minujín is an Argentine performance artist born in 1943 in Buenos Aires. Marta first exhibited her artwork in her natal city in 1959. After finishing her studies at the Escuela de Bellas Artes Manuel Belgrano and the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes in 1963, she went to Paris with a fellowship to study painting with the Nouveaux Réalistes. Minujin is a pioneer of performance art, video, happenings and soft sculpture. The materials she use are those that are inherently ephemeral, such as cardboard, glass, food or paper creating artworks both fragile and monumental, like the Parthenon of Books (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1983/Kassel, Germany, 2017). A conversation with Andy Warhol in New York regarding the Latin American debt crisis inspired in 1985 one of her most publicized happenings: "The Debt", in which, purchasing a shipment of maize, Minujín dramatized the Argentine payment for the perennial debt with a photo series in which she symbolically handed the maize to Warhol.