Alfredo Hlito

Alfredo Hlito Oliveri (4 May 1923 – 28 March 1993) was an Argentine painter and writer associated with the concrete art movement. He was a founding member of the Concrete Art-Invention Association and a signatory of the 1942 Manifiesto de Cuatro Jóvenes.

Early life Alfredo Hlito was born on 4 May 1923 in Buenos Aires to Syrian immigrants. He entered the in 1938, and in 1942 began studying at the National University of the Arts. His early art style was heavily influenced by Spanish-Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres-García.

In 1945, Hlito co-founded the Concrete Art-Invention Association (Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención, AACI) alongside Girola, Maldonado, Enio Iommi, Lidy Prati, Raúl Lozza, Manuel Espinoza, and Juan Melé. He left AACI in 1946 and focused on organizing concrete art exhibitions in Buenos Aires, most notably the Nuevas Realidades exhibition at the Van Riel Gallery in 1948.

Hlito, Maldonado, and Carlos Méndez Mosquera founded the magazine Nueva Visión in 1951 which sought to highlight little known Argentine avant-garde artists. The magazine was published from 1951 to 1957. In 1954, he exhibited at the second São Paulo Biennial, at which he received the Acquisition Award (Premio Adquisición). In 1955, he exhibited at the 28th Venice Biennale.

Hlito moved to Mexico in 1964, where he resided until 1973. In 1980, he participated in an exhibit at the Eduardo Sívori Museum in Buenos Aires that highlighted the 1940s concrete art output of both AACI and Grupo Madí. He became a professor at the National University of the Arts in 1984. In 1987, the university held a retrospective exhibit of his works, called Alfredo Hlito, Paintings 1945-1985. In 1990, he participated in an exhibit dedicated to AACI and Grupo Madí at the Rachel Adler Gallery in New York.

He was a recipient of the Konex Award twice, in 1982 and 1992, for his contributions to the non-figurative painting discipline.

Style Hlito mostly worked with oil paint until the 1970s when he switched to acrylic paint. Alongside concrete art, he experimented with Neoplasticism and Pointillism. He primarily painted outdoor scenes, interspersing colors to contrast light and shadow and used straight and curved lines to represent landscapes. He painted with a technique he called espectros ( spectra) which consists of applying regular and rhomboidal brushstrokes, using colors diluted to the point of transparency, which gave luminosity to the paintings.

Notable works Source:

Líneas tangentes (1956), oil, 1.39 m x 1.19 m (4.6 ft x 3.9 ft), National Museum of Fine Arts Simetría (1958), oil, 1 m x 0.7 m (3.3 ft x 2.3 ft), private collection Espectro (1959), oil, 1.3 m x 1.5 m (4.3 ft x 4.9 ft), private collection Efigie (1977), acrylic, 1.4 m x 0.7 m (4.6 ft x 2.3 ft), private collection