2. Artists & stock
3. Antonio Segui
4. Biography

Notes of biography

Painter and engraver, Antonio Segui was born in 1934 in Cordoba, Argentina. From 1951 to 1961, he learnt painting in Argentina, Spain, France, and he traveled over the world. His first solo exhibition was in Cordoba, in 1957. In 1958, he did a long travel through the South America and central America, then he settled in Mexico where he studied the different techniques of engraving. In 1961 he came back to Argentina. In 1963 he moved definitively to Paris, and there he represented his country at the Biennale in Paris. From 1976 to 1983 he has been banned from Argentina because, in his paintings,  he satirized  the political situation. During this time, he was living and working in France.
By the beginning of his career he was influenced by artists like George Grosz and Otto Dix; he did expressionist figuration with a lot of irony. Few a few, the figuration evolved to absurd, joke, humour, building a kind of theater: on the stage, a man in movement is trying to find his place in the world. In his work,  El Señor Gustavo, (Sir Gustave), a dark figure dressed with a suit and wearing a hat, goes through the canvas. He looks like a double of himself. The man wards off death, he takes life seriously. Full of life, under the costumes, he hides a part of dream.
During the sixties and seventies, he did expressionist and satirizing paintings about the political and sociological history of South America. Above all, Antonio Segui evoked the tragic of the human condition.
Since the end of the seventies, he has done a series of auto biographic paintings; his subjects are  landscapes from Argentina, elephants in Pampa, the anatomy lesson, Paris, the parks at night or New York. We are questioned by his artworks which are an enigma, and still refer to the title of a series « I want you to do the story ». That raises questions.
Antonio Segui uses charcoal, pastel, pencil, or pen. He creates a colored and graphic world with urban excitement in the bottom, like in the universe of the comics.
In parallel with his paintings he produced important artworks on paper, engravings and drawings. In 2005, the firm of graphic arts, National Modern Art Museum showed a retrospective of his artworks on paper.
Segui has a sense of humour, irony and subtlety. Like his artwork, from where authoritarian dwarfs are looking at us, in a world where humour is only courtesy of horror. Where, for him, memories are experiments. Like tango and Carlos Gardel.
Antonio Segui is living in Arcueil.
Antonio Segui died in Buenos Aires in February 2022.

• Back to the works ARTIST ALARM

  You want to be alarmed for any new work by this artist ? Enter your email address to get an alarm

  * Your phone number allows us to stay in touch in case our answer goes to your spam folder !

  I have read and accept the website mchampetier.com's Confidentiality and personal data protection charter.

  
  Alarm me