An Uruguayan artist with German roots, born in 1937, Luis Camnitzer has lived and worked in the United States since 1964. In 1965 he founded the experimental New York Graphic Workshop with José Guillermo Castillo and Liliana Porter.

A conceptual artist since the seventies, he has created installations with strong political content, taking as his themes freedom, identity and ethics. The ideas with which he works are reinforced by accompanying text.

Camnitzer establishes an unusual relationship between the world and objects through his singular reading of the mundane. The "realism" of his images is contrasted with the ambiguity of the text and the combination of elements. His works have a strong tendency to allegorize language. The materials and procedures used in his work are a poetic reference to memory, identity or what has been broken after years of exile, revealing a reinterpretation of the conceptualism of the seventies.

The space of what was paint before is occupied by a vast spectrum of procedures and tributary concepts of an art of Ideas.

Solo Shows (selection)

1995 Basta Gallery, Hamburg, Germany
1995 Museo del Barrio, NewYork.
1995 Carla Stellweg Gallery, New York
1994 Galería Tovar y Tovar, Bogota, Columbia
1993 Museo Carrilo Gil, Mexico
1992 ICI Buenos Aires, Argentina
1991 Museo Blanes, Montevideo, Uruguay
1991 Gallería Il Bisonte, Florence, Italy
1991 Bienal de La Habana, Cuba
1989/79 – Venice Biennial

Awards and Honors (Selection)

1958 Annual Printmaking Award, Academy of Munich
1963/68 Honorable Mention, Bienal de Chile
1965 Second prize, Xylon, International Xilography Competition, Switzerland.
1965 Honorary member of the Academy in Florence
1970 Prize, First Biennial of San Juan of the Latin American Print, Puerto Rico
1973 Honorable Mention, Biennial of Ljubljana
1974 Prize, British International Print Biennial, Bradford
1988 Represented Uruguay in the Biennial of Venice
1996 First prize ES96. Tijuana Salón Internacional de Estandartes

Permanent collections (selection)

Museum of Modern Art, New York
Metropolitan Museum, New York
Whitney Museum, New York
Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires
Museo del Grabado, Buenos Aires
Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile
Museu de Arte Contemporânea, São Paulo
Museum of Malmö
Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris
Biblioteca Communale, Milan
Museo de Arte Moderno, Bogota
Museo de Arte Moderno, Cartagena
Museo La Tertulia, Cali
National Museum of Modern Art, Baghdad
Casa de las Américas, Havana
Skopje Museum, Macedonia

Ljubljana, Slovenia
Centro Wifredo Lam, Havana
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana
The Jewish Museum, New York
Museo Nacional de Artes Plásticas, Montevideo
Museo del Barrio, New York
Cabinet of Drawings and Prints of the Uffizzi, Florence, Italy
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston