Gonzalo Elvira

Gonzalo Elvira (Patagonia, Argentina, 1971) studied at Antonio Berni School of Visual Arts in Argentina and started his exhibition career in 1993. He has lived and worked in Barcelona since 2000, and combines his artistic facet with intense educational work concentrated in the Obra Door studio, which he manages and runs in the district of Gracia.

Gonzalo Elvira’s work has developed over the years the form of series that, far from being closed, are revisited or recovered at particular moments with a great thematic relation between them and being fully complementary.

Among his work we must mention these series: 12 canciones concretas, a project dedicated to the monument that Walter Gropius conceived as homage to the nine workers murdered during a strike in Weimar; La balada de Simón, which reconstructs the political vicissitudes and complicated life of Simón Radowitzky, a Ukrainian-Argentinian anarchist who, after the brutal police repression of the events of the Red Week in Buenos Aires (1909), attacked the police chief who was responsible, Ramón Lorenzo Falcón; Lo Imborrable, which takes its title from a book by Juan José Saer and was made starting from an analysis of the last dictatorship in Argentina; Assaig S.T. 1909-1919, a work in which two historic events, the Tragic Week in Barcelona and the one in Buenos Aires are put face to face; and finally, Bauhaus 1919, Modelo para armar about the important school and its greatly idealised model, a work that has with time come to focus on the women and the role that they played in this German school.

Elvira has exhibited his work in many art centres and galleries in Europe and in America, among which we can mention his individual exhibitions in: Parque de la Memoria – Monument a las Víctimas del Terrorismo de Estado (Buenos Aires), La Virreina-Centro de la Imagen (Barcelona), Museo Juan Sánchez, (Patagonia, Argentina), CEDINCI – Centro de Investigación de la Cultura de Izquierdas – (Buenos Aires) and among the collective exhibitions: MACBA – Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona (Barcelona), Azkuna Zentroa – Alhóndiga Bilbao (Bilbao), CAB (Burgos), Fundación Alon (Buenos Aires) and the Fundación Vila Casas (Barcelona).

He has recently been selected as one of the eight artists to be awarded grants by the prestigious Beca de Artes Plásticas de la Fundación Botín.

In recent years his works have been purchased by various public and private collections in a number of countries including: Fundación DKV (Spain), Colección José Luis Lorenzo, (Argentina), Colección Paula Acevedo (Brazil), Colección Mauricio Kassim (Colombia), Colección M.A. Sánchez (Spain), Museo Martín Almagro (Spain), Museo Juan Sánchez (Argentina), Fundación Alon (Argentina).