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.
Read more about this topic: Luis Camnitzer
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“I had many problems in my conduct of the office being contrasted with President Kennedy’s conduct in the office, with my manner of dealing with things and his manner, with my accent and his accent, with my background and his background. He was a great public hero, and anything I did that someone didn’t approve of, they would always feel that President Kennedy wouldn’t have done that.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In the true sense one’s native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)