b. 1913 San Pedro, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Untitled, 1954, Bronze and wood, 63 x 10 in

Alicia Penalba was born in 1913 in San Pedro, Buenos Aires and grew up in Valparaiso, Chile.  As a teenager she attended art school in Buenos Aires. In 1948 she received a grant from the French government and moved to Paris.  In Argentina she had been making paintings, but France proved transformative, and she started making sculpture.   Penalba created her Totem series to symbolically depict the source of all creation and the beginning of life itself.  All works from this series feature a concave center – a biomorphic abstraction of nature’s protections like the shell of a nut or the nest of a bird.   While making these works, Penalba drew inspiration from the vertically soaring architecture of the gothic cathedrals of Europe, and also from the natural environment of her youth – the black rocks at the beach in Chile where she played as a child.  She described making the Totem works as a great liberation; her sculptures began “to open up and to fly.”

Penalba participated in Documenta II in Kassel, Germany, in 1959, received the grand prize for sculpture at the 1961 Sao Paolo Biennial, and in 1968 exhibited at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris with Wilfredo Lam and Roberto Matta.  Her work is included in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; Zentrum Paul Klee, Berne, Switzerland; Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro; Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, Santiago, Chile, and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, among others.