Jorge DelaVega Sold at Auction Prices

Painter

(b Buenos Aires, 27 March 1930; d Buenos Aires, 26 Aug 1971). Argentine painter. He studied architecture for six years before devoting himself to painting. His first works were sensitive geometric abstractions. In 1961 he took part in the exhibition Otra figuración at the Galería Peuser in Buenos Aires with Ernesto Deira, Rómulo Macció and Luis Felipe Noé, working in a style derived from the Cobra group; this was a milestone in the renewal of Argentine figurative painting. The Surrealist elements visible in his early work disappeared during the two years (1965–7) that he lived in the USA, first to teach painting at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, and then on a Fulbright fellowship. On his return to Argentina he began to paint psychologically penetrating pictures of male and female faces and body parts, such as Jigsaw Puzzle (1967; see Glusberg, p. 76), in a bold graphic style reminiscent of poster designs. Capturing expressions full of feeling and emotion but picturing them in a style at once ironic and dramatic, de la Vega wanted his art to be as natural and free from limitations as life itself. During the last years of his life he also wrote and sang popular protest songs.