Forner, Raquel – Argentine

Biography of Raquel Forner

Raquel Forner was born in Buenos Aires in 1902. She had a Spanish father and an Argentine mother with Basque ancestry. Forner travelled to Spain for the first time at the age of twelve. Here, she was to have her first contact with the art world and produce her first drawings.

She studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, where she graduated as a drawing teacher, finishing her studies in 1922. She held her first exhibition at the National Salon in 1924. She won third prize and critical acclaim, being lauded by the press for her expressiveness and personality at such an early stage in her career.

Her participation in the First University Salon of La Plata, Argentina, in 1926 allowed her to exhibit her work in different European cities such as Paris, Madrid, Rome and Venice. She held her first individual exhibitions two years later in Buenos Aires and La Plata.

In 1929 she returned to Europe on a study trip, where she was to visit Spain again and travel to Morocco and Italy. Finally, she settled in Paris with her parents and sister. There she studied with Othon Friesz at the Scandinavian Academy.

At this time other Argentine artists had also travelled to France to study and develop their artistic careers. They included Horacio Butler, Aquiles Badi, Alberto Morera, Alfredo Bigatti and Leopoldo Marechal. Forner travelled to Sanary-sur-Mer in the south of the country over several summers to meet up with this group of artists. The “Paris Group” emerged from these first meetings and group exhibitions that were held later.

So named by their compatriots in Argentina due to artists residing in the French capital taking part in salons and group exhibitions in Buenos Aires, the Paris Group was officially made up of the artists Horacio Butler, Aquiles Badi, Alberto Morera, Alfredo Bigatti, Victor Pissarro, Raquel Forner, Pedro Dominguez Neira, Juan Del Prete, Hector Basaldúa, Antonio Berni and Lino Enea Spilimbergo.

The artists of this collective, including Forner herself, exhibited in Buenos Aires and Paris indistinctly [1]. This was so much the case and such was the presence of Forner and her colleagues in the Argentine capital that they are also considered an integral part of the Florida Group . The latter emerged in Buenos Aires – closely related to the magazine Martín Fierro – and brought together all those artists who worked in art between the 1920s and 1930s. This group was linked to the emergence of the avant-garde in the port city, with the desire to break with traditional art based on the modern languages of Europe, but combining them with elements of traditional and local culture.

However, it wasn’t until the end of 1930 that Raquel Forner was to return to Buenos Aires, as the rest of the artists of the Paris Group did, year after year, with the relationship between many of them already broken.

In October that same year, Forner held an individual exhibition at the Salón de la Wagneriana in her hometown upon an invitation by the painter Alfredo Guttero. A year later she joined forces with Guttero himself, Pedro Domínguez Neira and Alfedo Bigatti to found a teaching academy in Buenos Aires, which they called “Free Plastic Art Courses”. Here, they reproduced the model of free workshops that they had seen in Paris.

Raquel Forner’s work

With regard to her artistic language, Forner explored movements like cubism and expressionism, with a high symbolic component that brought her closer to surrealism and that was accentuated in her work from 1938 onwards.

Forner continued working and exhibiting in Buenos Aires and beyond. In 1934 she received the second prize at the Salón Nacional. Two years later, she married the sculptor Alfredo Bigatti. The couple travelled to different Latin American countries like Bolivia, Chile and Paraguay. In 1937, Forner obtained the Gold Medal at the Paris International Exhibition.

In 1938 Forner started work on her series, such as España (“Spain”) (1938-1939) and El Drama (“The Drama”) (1939-1946), dedicated to the wars that took place in Europe and the social and human crises that ensued. They were to be followed by others like Las Rocas (“The Rocks”) (1947-1948); Las Banderías (“The Factions”), Los Estandartes (“The Banners”), La Farsa (“The Farce”) (1948-1952); El Lago (“The Lake”) (1953-1954); El Apocalipsis (“The Apocalypse”) (1954-1956); Piscis (“Pisces”) (1956-1957). They were all also based on the tragedies of humanity with a high symbolic component.
In addition to her expressionist and neo-figurative language with large doses of surrealism, Forner identified with social art concentrating on political demands and criticism. This can be seen in the aforementioned series and that she would continue to develop in subsequent series until the end of her life.

From 1957, coinciding with the launch of the Sputnik 1 and 2 spacecraft and the first artificial satellites to orbit the Earth , Forner started work exclusively on her series dedicated to space. She also tackled the anxieties of contemporary man that lead him to discover new worlds and possibilities.

This stage is marked by an artistic language with much more symbolic expressionism that verges on informalism. This can be seen in the lines and the use of bright colours, without reaching pure abstraction. This language, already present in previous works like the El Apocalipsis (“The Apocalypse”) series, takes on a new dimension and is transformed by the possibilities opened up by this new theme. Her works are filled with matter and colour, creating a new symbolic dimension filled with anthropomorphic space-going beings.

Within this theme are her series Las Lunas (“Moons”) (1957-1965), Los que vieron la Luna (“Those who saw the Moon”) (1962-1965), La Astrofauna (“Astrofauna”) (1963-1967), Los Astronautas (“Astronauts”) (1965) Los Laberintos (“Labyrinths”) (1967-1969), Los Terráqueos (“Earthlings”) (1968-1969), Mutaciones Espaciales (“Space Mutants”) (1970), Los Grandes Mutantes (“The Great Mutants”) (1972), Del Espacio (“From Space”) (1973), Los Mutantes (“Mutants”) (1974), Apocalipsis en Planeta Tierra (“Apocalypse on Planet Earth”) (1979-1980), Seres en otras Galaxias (“Beings in other Galaxies”) (1980-1981), Encuentro con Astroseres en Ischigualasto (“Encounter with Astrobeings in Ischigualasto”) (1986).

Silvia Sánchez Ruiz
Curator

[1] She took part in group exhibitions in this city with the aforementioned artists and with other Latin American artists who were in the French capital at that time, such as the Uruguayans Carlos Alberto Castellanos, Pedro Figari and Joaquín Torres García and the Mexican artists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and Agustín Lazo.