“I was attacking the static nature of artworks. More importantly, I was attacking the idea of the extraordinary artist.”
- Julio Le Parc
Julio Le Parc was born in Mendoza in 1928, but currently lives and works in Cachan, France. He is an Argentine artist associated with Op Art and Kinetic Art movements. Le Parc attended the School of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, where he formed the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visual (GRAV), along with Francisco Sobrino, François Morellet, Yvaral (Jean Pierre Vasarely), and others.
This group, active in Paris in the 1960s, was committed to creating collaborative works and merging individual artistic endeavors into collective, anonymous activity centered around events called Labyrinths. These events focused on using artificial light and mechanical movement to explore optical effects. During this time, Le Parc also conducted his own experiments with light, creating his first mobiles from small Plexiglas pieces, connected and suspended from the ceiling. He also created light-based works using projectors to play with rhythms of light and sound. In 1966, he received the Grand Prize in Painting at the 33rd Venice Biennale.
Although less active in the 1970s, Le Parc continued developing his “Modulaciones” (Modulations) series - airbrushed works in gray, black, and white - as well as his Alchemy series. He has had numerous retrospectives at important institutions across Latin America and Europe, including recent solo exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2013), Casa Daros, Rio de Janeiro (2014) and the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (2014).