The Franco-Argentine artist Mario Gurfein or the colour of memories

The Franco-Argentine artist Mario Gurfein opens this Tuesday, September 17, an important exhibition at the Galeria Argentina in Paris entitled 'Abstractions et figurations'. But before that, he was with Jordi Batalle at RFI's El invitados.
Mario Gurfein was born in Buenos Aires in 1945. He studied violin with Ljerko Spiller and painting at the Mutual de Estudiantes y Egresados de Bellas Artes. At the age of 18, he received the 1st prize for painting from the Sociedad Hebrea Argentina. For a long period, from 1959 to 1963, he worked alongside the surrealist master Juan Batlle Planes, with whom he made several murals. His arrival in Europe occurred in an unusual way for an artist: thanks to a job on a freighter.

Paul Klee’s paintings and Ali Baba’s cave have strongly influenced his artistic career. Perhaps in these references we can find the origin of that particular phosphorescence that illuminates his paintings. The atmosphere of his paintings is wrapped in a dance of mystery and veils of light.

Gurfein works slowly, with materials from other times such as homemade tempera created with a transparent glue derived from milk. The evanescent and intangible nature of his images oscillates between presence and reminiscence. In his work we observe infinite worlds, houses illuminated by immense skies and solitary trees lost in dreamlike deserts.

Living in Paris since 1980, his work belongs to private collections in Germany, Argentina, Belgium, Colombia, Spain, the United States, France, Holland, Italy, Switzerland, Uruguay and Venezuela.

He exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (1968), Paris; the Grand Palais (1982), Paris; the Salon d’Art (1984), Brussels, Belgium; the National Museum of Fine Arts (2004), Buenos Aires; UNESCO (2006), Paris and most recently at the Maison de L’Amérique Latine in Paris in 2023.
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