Joaquín Torres-García
(Montevideo, Uruguay, 1874 – Montevideo, Uruguay, 1949): Painter, professor, and theoretician who developed a fruitful career as a modernist muralist and illustrator. However, it was his pictorial works—pioneers of Latin American concrete art—which shaped and propelled an aesthetic and ideological movement of its own, which would take on the mission of introducing the new artistic languages into the local context. Furthermore, the Torres-García workshop (also known as La Escuela del Sur) (The School of the South) was the space for educational experimentation and dissemination of the metaphysical aspects of art and of the movement created by the artist. His ideas concerning the communion between mankind and the cosmos, as well as the search for a continental cultural identity of the Americas were reflected on and developed throughout a series of theoretical lessons, later compiled in his most influential written work: Constructive Universalism (1944).
