Hugo Demarco

Hugo Demarco

Hugo Demarco (1932-1995)

Hugo Demarco was born on July 13, 1932, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. After studying at the Beaux-Arts of the capital, he became a professor in 1957. Imbued with European culture, partly thanks to his Italian origins, he moved to Paris in the 1960s, where he established himself for good. He lived his entire life there, although he was also very active in Brescia, where he resided for a certain period. Demarco exhibited throughout Europe, notably at the Galerie Denise René from 1961. He joined the Lumino-Kinetic group and the GRAV (Visual Art Research Group), but did not limit himself to a single group, constantly broadening his research.

Inspired by constructivism and the Bauhaus, Demarco defended the autonomy of art as well as its experimental nature. His work is based on the square form and its geometric reduction. Although he never abandoned painting, he further explored metals and glass, materials that allowed him to push his experiments with light, transparency, and geometry. In his stainless steel or chrome sculptures of the 1980s, he sought to “animate a space by means of the line,” and in his “sculpture-machines” of the 1970s, he set simple and colored elements in motion, often inspired by primary geometric forms. Strongly linked to the Op Art movement, his pictorial work integrates the notion of movement and color as inseparable elements.

Demarco established himself as one of the most innovative artists of his time in the use of light in motion, notably with his fluorescent mobiles working in black light. Parallel to his sculptures and mobiles that seek dynamism and movement, he developed a geometric painting based on the vibration of color.

Among his major exhibitions, we note: Le Mouvement 2 at the Galerie Denise René in 1964, The Responsive Eye at MoMA in New York in 1965, Lumière et Mouvement at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1967, and L’Art en Mouvement at the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in 1992.