With this big project, the Museum of Modern Art and the Arts District pay homage to Kemble, a protagonist in the transition from modern art to contemporary art in Argentina, promoter of the assemblage from his practice in the painting milieu and through ground-breaking projects like the exhibition of Destructive Art (1961)

The mural is the first contemporary monumental piece in public space well documented and known to this day, made in a decade marked by the movement of the work of art towards the city.

This piece is part of a series of paintings that Kemble made since 1959, in which he exhibits the pictorial sign par excellance- the brush-stroke- on canvas of big dimensions. This works do not come of a fast , expressionist gesture, quite the opposite: each huge stroke is the result of a calculated transposition, milimetre by milimetre, starting from a small sketch. While the informalism was at the peak of the Buenos Aires scene, Kemble already trascended with a proto-conceptual thought. This paintings are a calculated, rational and magnified analysis of the expressionist gesture, which looks into the issue of the pictorial sign by building a bridge with writing, thus, opening a new path that will set the foundations of Latin American Conceptual Art.

As Javier Villa, senior curator of the Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art, points, “nowadays we circulate a moment of revisionist work in art history, not only from historiography but also from the reconstruction of pieces and the exhibit of archives of crucial artist for the history of argentine art. The reconstruction of the Kemble´s mural is extremely relevant for the cultural heritage of the Buenos Aires City, because we retrieve a fundamental piece to understang the changes of modern painting towards contemporaneity.”

Once arteBA 2016 comes to an end, the mural will be set in different locations of the Buenos Aires City thanks the support of the Ministery of Enviroment and Public Space, and will be finally located in the Arts District.