The exhibition, The Monsters by Argentine artist Antonio Berni is being presented at the Borges Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The show opened last September 2001, and will run until the end of March 2002. The art critic and researcher Elena Oliveras acts as Curator to this exhibition.

Antonio Berni died in Buenos Aires on October 13, 1981, at 76 years of age. On the twentieth anniversary of his death, the Borges Cultural Center paid homage to him with a very significant selection of his works that he made between the years 1964-1971. There are twenty of his Monsters ç constructions in mixed media of rare impact, not only due to their size but for their allusion to what may not be named, a secret world of nightmares and threats.

Some Monsters that he made in Paris will be seen by the Argentinean public for the first time, while the rest have not been exhibited because they are so hard to transport being huge but ephemeral, made of recyclable materials. Now, thanks to the cooperation of Berni’s children, Lili and José Antonio, together with the efforts of Borges Cultural Center, the pieces have been restored to be exhibited and enjoyed as a whole set.

Berni started building his prodigious Monsters in 1964 in a struggle to place in space and thus make more visible, terrifying aspects of the present world. They were included in the retrospective show organized by the Di Tella Institute, in 1965, in which as well as these pieces, paintings, drawings, and engravings from the period 1922-1965, were included. Visitors were then astonished to see a set of pieces grouped in two series: The Monsters From Hell Fight Over Ramona and Cosmic Monsters. The first of these series belongs to Greed and Hypocrisy. In them we can see Ramona’s body, divided in two and almost being devoured. In the second series, The Triumphant Worm is outstanding, since it is more than five meters long, as well as The Threatening Bird and The Sordidness (recently exhibited in the exhibition Versions of the South, organized by the Reina Sofí­a Cultural Center in Madrid, Spain). All these works were shown in this occasion.