Visual artist, architect and designer. His work is part of the main Argentinian artistic movements of the second half of the twentieth century, especially identified with the emergence of conceptual art and its many expressions. Among his many interests, Benedit explored the relationship between art and science, which allowed him to have an anthropological regard on the analysis of behavior conditioned by the medium. Also, he centered his investigations in a critical approach of the ways in which national symbols are constructed, including gestures and citations of local artistic productions and fragments of stories of the naturalists who explored Patagonia. His first exhibitions depict his path from an initial informalism towards neofiguration, through images not exempt of critical humor: El candidato, Prócer federal, among many others featured in his show Nuevos rostros, held at Lirolay Gallery in 1961. At that time, he started experimenting with the combination of oil and enamel. After exhibiting at the Rubbers Gallery in 1967, he moved with his family to Rome, to study Landscape Architecture. His interests extend to the biological and the possibility of incorporating living organisms in his artworks. He returns to Buenos Aires in 1968, where he continues to work as an architect and visual artist. Benedit presents his first artificial habitat at the exhibition Materiales. Nuevas técnicas. Nuevas expresiones, held at the National Museum of Fine Arts. At his exhibition Microzoo, in Rubbers Gallery, the artist exhibits different living spaces for plants and animals —such as bees, fish, turtles, ants and cats. Benedit aims to analyze the behavior of these animals, and how they are conditioned by their surroundings, which are, in this case, artificial and culturally produced. He highlights the opposition between nature and culture; the gesture and the blurring of the artistic territory, as well as the appropriation of materials and techniques usually associated to biology as a discipline. Through his practice, Benedit transgresses the limits of experimental sciences and takes them into sociological and philosophical fields. In 1969, he participated in the exhibition Arte y cibernética, organized and curated by Jorge Glusberg, where he displayed his computer designs. This collaboration with Glusberg would continue throughout the years. In 1970, Benedit presented at the Venice Biennale one of his best-known habitats: the Biotrón, with the collaboration of scientists Antonio Battro and José Núñez, and of Glusberg himself. In 1971, he is part of the exhibition Arte de sistemas, a show that now can be read as the prelude of the emergence of the conceptual art collective Grupo de los 13, led by Glusberg and with the CAyC as headquarters. Benedit belonged to this group since their first exhibition, Hacia un perfil del arte latinoamericano, in 1972, up until the last one, Grupo CAyC, which occurred in Santiago de Chile in 1994. In Arte de sistemas (1971) Benedit exhibited his work Laberinto invisible, an installation where the viewer walks around a path regulated by a set of mirrors, sensors and sound alarms. In 1972, he is invited to exhibit individually at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He presents his work Fitotrón, a hydroponic cultivation system acquired by the museum. In that same year, the artist begins a series of drawings in pencil and watercolor that imitate the work of naturalists: views of insects and other species, with notes and analytical references. In 1977, he participates in the collective shipment of the Grupo de los 13 to the Sao Paulo Biennial; not without controversy, the group is awarded with the Itamaraty Grand Prize. Around this time, Benedit begins to develop a new series of conceptual works, based on the drawings of his son Tomás, who was only five years old back then. These works consist of three elements: the drawing of his son, a project that featured a re- elaboration of the drawing as a design, and the concretion of the project in a volumetric object. This series is exhibited, in the early ‘80s, in Los Angeles, New York and Tokyo. In 1978, Luis F. Benedit starts to work with topics related to the construction of the national identity, from a critical regard. His first approach focused on the field as Argentina’s main agricultural and livestock force, and its particular characteristics: gauchos, farms and tools, such as castrating or wire tweezers, and designs to mark the cattle. Along with Clorindo Testa and Jacques Bedel, in 1979, he won the contest for remodeling the building of the Recoleta Cultural Center. In 1983, he designed the building of the Galería Ruth Benzacar and, in 1990, that of the Munar Foundation, dedicated to design. Between 1984 and 1986, his research on nationality included topics related to pictorial production: citations and reworkings of works by Jean-Léon Pallière and traveling painters. At the end of the decade he focuses on his interest in Patagonia and, particularly, in the expeditions of naturalists such as Fitz Roy and Darwin, in Del viaje del Beagle. These works, which comprised drawings and objects, simulate the objects exhibited in a museum of natural sciences. In 1990, his book Memorias australes is published in Milan. In that same year, he participates, with the CAyC Group, of the exhibition El Dorado, which versed on one of the most painful myths and facts of the conquest of South America. His interests expand, once again, to new topics: the 1930s in Argentina and its most notable suicides: Leopoldo Lugones, Alfonsina Storni and Horacio Quiroga. A wall installation with this theme is presented at the Havana Biennial. To this type of installations, which feature different expressive means, Benedit calls them obras- informe. Among the many topics of these works, he tackles critical issues, such as the persecution of the original ethnic groups, especially the yaganes, and the “Indian hunter” Mac Lennan. In 1996, Benedit presented an extensive retrospective of his work at the National Museum of Fine Arts. In his last years, he continued to reflect on national identity. A new element appears in his practice: cow and horse bones become the material with which he assembles and builds objects and low reliefs; in these pieces, the rationality of its form opposes to the rawness of the material. Many of these works are exhibited in 2009 in Equinus Equestris, a show curated by Patricia Rizzo at the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (MALBA). There, the figure of the creole horse appears as the “political animal” par excellence. Benedit passed away in Buenos Aires, on April 12, 2011. His work is part of public and private Argentinian and international art collections, among them the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (MALBA), Daros Latinamerica Collection, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH), the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires (MAMBA), and the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA).