marta minujín
On the occasion of Marta Minujín’s first solo exhibition at kurimanzutto, New York, Making a Presence, we present a selection of projects by the artist for this edition of From the Archive. The exhibition showcases informalist paintings from the earliest moments of her six-decade-long career alongside more recent examples of her multicolored mattress sculptures. The following recounts projects between these two distinct bodies of work, which established Minujín as a pioneer in transforming passive viewers into active participants through happenings, participatory environments, and mass media art in her native country of Argentina and abroad.
Informalism and Parision Destruction
Minujín’s Buenos Aires studio, 1962
In Making a Presence, Minujín’s informalist works and her latest mattress pieces come together for the first time since 1963, when these two formats shared a space in the artist’s studio in Paris. Minujín made her first informalist paintings in Buenos Aires at the end of the 1950s, embracing the international art movement that rejected traditional artistic conventions in favor of abstraction and spontaneity. These works incorporated materials like cardboard packaging, sand, and carpenter’s glue to create textured surfaces. In the early 1960s, she received a scholarship to study art from the French government and moved to Paris, where she produced her first sculptures from large cardboard boxes and eventually old mattresses, sourced from the streets and hospital dumpsters. In their raw state, the austere and gritty sculptures retain ties to informalism, reflecting the harsh realities of postwar urban life in the French capital.
Documentation of La destrucción, Impasse Ronsin, Paris, June 6, 1963
After concluding an exhibition at her studio in 1963, Minujín orchestrated a groundbreaking event, inviting artists like Christo, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Jean Tinguely to intervene in her sculptures and help set them ablaze. “I will take everything except the little house that does not come out of the door,” wrote Minujín, “and we destroy everything at the end with fire. I think it will be exceptional.” This event, known as La destrucción (Destruction, 1963), marked Minujín’s first official happening—a term coined by Allan Kaprow in 1959 that involved audience participation in a staged environment. The piece paved the way for subsequent artistic endeavors in the 1960s.
Rolling on Mattresses
In 1963, her final year in Paris, Minujín encountered a vibrant striped miniskirt: “I passed by a shop window and was dazzled by a pink and turquoise skirt. There, seeing that, something broke in me, it was pop! I discovered colors…my life changed completely.” This emblem of the sexual revolution inspired a radical shift in her soft sculptures. Abandoning the found mattress, she crafted new ones, painting them with distinctive, multicolored stripes. These soft, organic forms intertwine and intersect to evoke bodily forms engaged in play and sensuality. Minujín describes her “love affair” with mattresses: “We spend half of our lives on mattresses. We are born on one and one day we will most likely die on one.”
Documentation of How to Be in a Movie happening at Soft Gallery, Harold Rivkin Gallery, Washington, D.C., April 1973
In her signature Pop aesthetic, Minujín’s interactive sculptural forms adorned floors, walls, and ceilings, evolving into immersive spaces. Collaborating with Dutch artist Mark Brusse, she created her first full-room installation La Chambre d’amour (The Chamber of Love, 1963) for a group exhibition at the Museum of Arts of Tokyo. This work fostered intimacy, inviting people to engage in acts like lovemaking, sleeping, and relaxing amongst bright mattresses enclosed by a wooden structure. A decade later, Minujín, along with artist Richard Squires, transformed the Harold Rivkin Gallery in Washington, D.C. into Soft Gallery (1973), covering it entirely with discarded mattresses for various collaborative activities. Soft Gallery was restaged for Marta Minujín: Ao Vivo at the Pinacoteca of Sao Paulo in 2023.
Pop Environments
Documentation of La menesunda
Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires, May 1965
Upon returning from Paris in 1963, Minujín pioneered participatory environments in Buenos Aires. She expanded on the interactivity and playfulness of her first mattress installations, responding to mass media and popular culture’s impact on daily life. Together with artist Rubén Santantonín, they presented La menesunda (Mayhem, 1965), among the earliest large-scale immersive experiences in art history. Over two weeks, the multi-sensorial work at Instituto Torcuato Di Tella spanned both floors and featured sixteen distinct environments. Blurring boundaries between art and everyday life, it drew a total of thirty thousand visitors into a neon-covered tunnel, a walk-in freezer, a functioning beauty salon, a bedroom with an undressed couple, and a hallway lined with televisions that showed real-time feedback loops of visitors walking throughout the space. La menesunda combined elements of experimental theater, installation, and television to immerse audiences in social situations typically confined to private settings.
La menesunda, 1965
In 2015, Minujín reconstructed the ephemeral work from archival images and narrative accounts at Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires and at the New Museum in New York in 2019. La menesunda will feature in the artist's forthcoming retrospective Marta Minujín: Intensify Life at the Copenhagen Contemporary, which will travel to Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, Tate Liverpool, and KANAL-Centre Pompidou in Brussels starting this fall.
Art and Technology
Minujín was one of the first Latin American artists to delve into the intersection of art and technology. While in New York from 1965 to 1966, she met Allan Kaprow and German artist Wolf Vostell and conceived A Three Country Happening, where each artist would create a simultaneous happening in their home country. Minujín’s contribution was Simultaneidad en simultaneidad (Simultaneity in Simultaneity, 1966), which involved filming and photographing sixty media personalities in Buenos Aires at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella auditorium. Nine days later, the same group watched the footage while wearing the same clothes. Alongside the footage, the celebrities and one thousand people in their homes, watched Invasión instantánea (Instant Invasion), a ten minute television and radio broadcast that began with Minujín announcing that she was invading them through mass communication circuits. Five hundred people then received calls and telegrams from Minujín, which read "You are a creator."
Documentation of Minujín during Simultaneidad en simultaneidad, 1966
Simultaneidad en simultaneidad was an unprecedented examination of the ubiquitous presence and artfulness of technology and media in everyday life. The work was exhibited in Signals: How Video Transformed the World at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2023.
Postcard from 1969 featuring Minuphone (1967)
Sketch of Minuphone, 1967
The following year, Minujín received a Guggenheim Fellowship, enabling her to move to New York and create one of her most technically sophisticated works, Minuphone (1967). The sensorial telephone booth identical to New York phone booths was created with engineer Per Biorn from Bell Telephone Laboratories and presented at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York. Minuphone featured a television screen on the floor projecting the participant in real time. Buttons could release colored liquids and clouds of green smoke, and speaking into the phone triggered echoes and colored lights, evocative of the hippie culture and psychedelia of the moment. A Polaroid captured the user’s experience, visible to onlookers, dissolving the boundaries between private and public with the increasing impact of telecommunications outside the home.
Toppled Obelisks
Minujín returned to Buenos Aires in the early 1970s, just before the military dictatorship began in Argentina. The heightened volatility inspired her to investigate monuments as antiquated symbols of authoritarian political power. El obelisco acostado (Obelisk Lying Down, 1978), the first of her series La caída de los mitos universales (The Fall of Universal Myths), was created for the 1978 Latin American Biennial of São Paulo. Minujín reproduced Buenos Aires’s 118 foot tall iconic obelisk and laid it on its side, making it accessible to the public. Inside, she further demystified the monument with an immersive installation that featured lighting effects and videos, continuing her exploration of participatory art and technology from the prior decade.
Documentation of El obelisco de pan dulce, Feria de Las Naciones, Buenos Aires, November 1979
In El obelisco de pan dulce (The Obelisk of Sweet Bread, 1979), the monument served the public through consumption. Minujín covered this iteration of the obelisk with 10,000 panettone cakes designed for the Second Feria de las Naciones in Buenos Aires. Minujín explained, “I decided that, to demystify the myth, really, the people have to eat the myth.” After ten days during the Christmas season, the anti-monument was placed on its side, and the sweet bread was distributed to the public while composer Osvaldo Piro played "Navidad de Buenos Aires.”
Parthenon of Books
In the same month that Argentina's military dictatorship fell and democracy was reestablished, Minujín undertook her most significant public project to date, El Partenón de libros (Parthenon of Books, 1983) in Buenos Aires. The presentation featured a half-scale reproduction of the Greek Parthenon, a site historically associated with the origins of democracy. The replica was wrapped in 20,000 books, which had been locked away in cellars by the military regime. On the last day of the two-week-long display, the structure was turned on its side, and 12,000 books were distributed, while the remaining ones were donated to public libraries. Describing the project Minujín states, “I laid down the Parthenon, and the people grabbed the books. So the people were going crazy because democracy was arriving. That was my biggest statement about democracy. Democracy without books is not democracy. So nobody has the right to forbid books, because that is to forbid ideas.”
El Partenón de libros, 1983
In 2017, Minujín created a full-scale replica of the Parthenon for documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany. Presented on a former Nazi book-burning site, the structure featured 100,000 books from around the world. These books are either now legally circulated after prohibition, or they are allowed in some countries while still banned in others.
Making a Presence
In an interview with a journalist after El Partenón de libros, Minujín predicts her own legacy: “I believe Marta Minujín will not be remembered for certain work at a museum, but for her overall attitude, for her art spectacles, for the way that she brought a sense of show and joy into an excessively sacralized intellectual terrain.” Minujín strives to incite joy in audiences and participants of her work. Joy arises when viewing images of individuals celebrating the end of a harsh seven-year military dictatorship in Argentina as they receive books that were once banned. People are filled with joy as they jump and roll around on the mattresses that fill Minujín’s Soft Gallery, and joy also emerges upon walking through the array of fluorescent soft sculptures on view in Making a Presence at kurimanzutto, New York.
Minujín with Implosión!, Santander Foundation, Buenos Aires, April–November, 2021
In 2004, after a hiatus of forty years, Minujín reprised her mattress sculptures from the 1960s and continues to make an ever evolving series of soft sculptures fashioned from brightly painted fabric and foam-mattresses, alongside works on paper and paintings with similar patterns. Her enduring fascination with mattresses and their boundless possibilities speaks to an artist whose practice remains consistent, active, and always rooted in experimentation.
The works on view at the gallery come alive through the personal and collective histories that birthed them and continue to reframe them in the present. Minujín makes a presence, and it is in this infectious presence where the spirit of her work resides.
