Background
Luis Camnitzer was born in Lübeck, Germany in 1937 and grew up in Montevideo, Uruguay. He moved to New York in 1964, where he and fellow artists Liliana Porter and José Guillermo Castillo founded the New York Graphic Workshop, a printmaking studio focused on the mathematical and repetitive nature of printmaking and dedicated to reviving the importance of printmaking as a contemporary art form. He received Guggenheim Fellowships in 1961 and 1982 and has made his mark internationally not only as an artist but as a critic, educator, and art theorist.
Formally allied with the American Conceptualists of the 1960s and 1970s, over the past fifty years Camnitzer has developed an essentially autonomous oeuvre. Through his art, Camnitzer often plays with the role of audience as silent witness and accomplice, within the arts as well as politics, often drawing on his youth in Montevideo under a repressive government that the international community allowed to persist.
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