Descripción
Antonio Frasconi, New York, Connecticut / Uruguay (1919-2013), , 84cm (33”) 48cm (19″ )W (leaf), 1962 Technique, woodcut in colors/ wood engraving Signed and dated below and titled ” Alhambra II
Antonio Frasconi
(1919)
Engraver and painter born in Buenos Aires on April 28, 1919. He is a legal Uruguayan citizen. He resides in
USA
In 1945 he traveled to the United States as a fellow at The Arts Students League of New York, where he settled.
country. He studied printmaking with Gross and with the US-based Japanese painter Yasu’o Kuniyoshi. He got
scholarship from the New School for Social Research in New York with which he perfected his engraving technique in
Madeira, from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Institute of Arts and Letters and Interamerican
Fellowship. He is the author of illustrations for multiple books, magazine covers and albums. He published collections of his
of his own engravings of him. He illustrated a limited edition of “Aesop’s Fables” for the Museum of Modern Art in New
York.
He obtained the Acquisition Award IV Municipal Hall, Montevideo, 1943; Venice International Grand Prix with 100
prints on poems by Walt Whitman, 1959; Acquisition Award XXI National Hall, 1967; Prize
Acquisition XXXIII National Hall, 1969. In 1999 he received the Figari Prize from the Central Bank.
He exhibited individually at the Ateneo de Montevideo, 1939; AIAPE, 1944; Cleveland Museum, 1952; baltimore
Museum, 1963; Brooklyn Museum, 1964; exhibited at the Fine Arts Commission of Montevideo, 1957; Underground
Municipality, 1961; Smithsonian Institution, 1953, 1963; General Electric Institute, 1967; National Gallery,
Washington, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1983; National Museum of Visual Arts, 1986; winter,
Switzerland, 1993; Fredikstad, Norway, 1995. He represented Uruguay at the São Paulo Modern Art Biennial, 1957;
at the XXXIV Venice Biennale, 1967, First Havana Biennale.
Frasconi does not reproduce drawings. He does not reproduce objects either: he converts them into signs. He divides the figure into
signs and, at the same time, discovers them in the texture of the wood itself. Signs with strong character
emblematic. They are (almost) calligraphic; hence the writing. Maybe that’s why you’re attracted to bookplates.
In Frasconi’s engravings, the texts are integrated into a homologous visual medium, just like the image.
He is represented in the National Museum of Visual Arts, in the “Juan Manuel Blanes” Municipal Museum, Library
of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.: Philadelphia Museum of Art,
Philadelphia; Museum of Modern Art in New York City and in dozens of museums and public collections
international.