A GLIMPSE INTO FERNANDO MAZA'S SURREAL WORLD AT THE MAR MUSEUM

The exhibition The Construction of Painting, organized by the National Museum of Fine Arts, opened last April at the MAR Provincial Museum of Contemporary Art. The show traces the career of Argentine visual artist Fernando Maza through his paintings and watercolors, with curatorial direction by Pablo De Monte.

Maza was born in Buenos Aires in 1936 and died in France in 2017. Between 1949 and 1953 he attended the studio of Raúl Podestá, a traditional painter and sculptor. In 1957 he began exhibiting at art salons in Buenos Aires, Rosario, and Santa Fe. He took part in the shows of the Informalist Movement in 1959 alongside artists of the stature of Alberto Greco and Kenneth Kemble. In 1960 he settled in New York, where he remained until 1973, before moving to London and then, definitively, to Paris in 1977. Throughout his career he received numerous international awards and grants.

The Director of the MAR Museum, Ezequiel Pérez Saenz, highlighted that "the exhibition features more than 50 paintings spanning part of his career: an opportunity to immerse oneself in the universe of a cosmopolitan and profound artist, whose work challenges us with the same intensity with which it was conceived."

For his part, Andrés Duprat, director of the National Museum of Fine Arts, noted: "In the tradition of metaphysical painting, the artist creates atmospheres that we perceive with a sense of strangeness. The limited repertoire of signs he draws upon configures the space of representation in a surreal manner and proposes an unusual relationship between figure and ground. Maza invites us to place our gaze in an abyss, as he manages to make the canvas a window into his original creative universe."

For De Monte, "Maza's paintings invite us to traverse a universe where things — objects, signs, and fragments — present themselves as protagonists of a landscape that does not seek to represent nature, but to construct it."

"In these landscapes, the horizon line not only divides sky and earth: it organizes, orders, and proposes a way of looking. Maza arranges objects that oscillate between the recognizable and the enigmatic: staircases that lead nowhere, arches that suggest passageways, linguistic signs that promise a message that never quite resolves. Letters, numbers, and the ampersand (&) become characters that inhabit and converse within a space where time seems to crystallize," the curator notes.

The exhibition Fernando Maza: The Construction of Painting was on view at the National Museum of Fine Arts from October 2025 through February 2026. Its arrival at the MAR Provincial Museum of Contemporary Art in Mar del Plata marks the beginning of a national tour that will bring the show to venues in Córdoba and Mendoza.