Roberto Elia

ROBERTO ELÍA (Buenos Aires, 1950- 2025).
Untitled, 1986.
Gouache on paper.
Signed and dated in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 20 x 27 cm; 33 x 40 cm (frame).
Roberto Elía was an Argentine visual artist whose work is characterized by a profound conceptual reflection on memory, language and the resignification of the everyday. Trained at the Manuel Belgrano National School of Fine Arts, he began his production in the late 1960s, developing since then a work that moves between drawing, painting, collage and objects, with a marked predilection for simple materials and found elements.
His first individual exhibition took place in 1979. He received a grant from the Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 1986, which allowed him to live in New York and deepen his research related to play, writing and symbolic structure. He held anthological exhibitions at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (1995) and at the Centro Cultural Recoleta (2003), and his work has been presented at institutions such as the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires, the Museo Eduardo Sívori, the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Maison de l'Amérique Latine in Paris, as well as at international fairs such as ARCO Madrid.
The experience of exile in Barcelona in the late 1970s, motivated by the violence of the Argentine civil-military dictatorship, indelibly marked his production, crossed by notions of absence, death and symbolic resistance. Deeply influenced by Argentine literature, especially by authors such as Borges, Girondo or Cortázar, Elía conceived his practice as a space of crossing between the visual and the poetic. He has received numerous awards, including the Gunther Prize, the First Prize for Painting from the CAYC-Centro Cultural Recoleta and the Fondo Nacional de las Artes Scholarship, and has developed an intense teaching work in Argentine art institutions since the early 1990s.