María Martorell (1909 – 2010) Born in Salta, Argentina.
In 1942, she began painting under the tutelage of the artist and set designer Ernesto M. Scotti. It is also around this time that she began to travel constantly to Buenos Aires, a city in which abstraction was growing strongly, generating a new avant-garde.
In 1946 she exhibited at the National Salon and in 1949 she received First Prize at the First Annual Painting Salon of Salta. This same year she received the First Prize from the Friends of Art Salon. In 1952, the artist settled in Madrid where she attended the free workshops of the Fine Arts Association and the San Fernando Academy Museum.
In 1954 she traveled to Paris, where she settled for a few years, connecting with the Denise René Art Gallery, which promoted abstraction and fundamentally works of an optical and kinetic nature.
At the beginning of the ’60s, and under the direction of Jorge Romero Brest as director of the National Museum of Fine Arts (MNBA), an intense modernizing program was proposed that included, for the first time, various exhibitions of contemporary Argentine art, legitimizing In this way, Martorell’s work in the national context of abstraction.
The 60s were the years when Martorell’s work was most visible. At the beginning of the decade she traveled to New York, where she connected with neofiguration, pop-art, happenings, kineticism and the dematerialization of her work. In 1961 she had a solo exhibition at the Collector’s Gallery in New York and the first exhibition of her tapestries in Salta.
In 1962 she exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chile and in 1963 she participated in the exhibition Eight Constructive Artists, at the MNBA, in Buenos Aires, invited by its director Jorge Romero Brest. In 1967 she inaugurated a solo exhibition of tapestries executed by textile artisans from Cafayate at the El Sol gallery in Buenos Aires. That year she also participated in the National Salon and the exhibition Beyond Geometry, at the Di Tella Institute.
In 1974 she presented an individual exhibition at the Venezuelan-Argentine Center for Scientific-Technological Cultural Cooperation in Caracas. In 1975 she presented two important exhibitions, both at the Bonino gallery in Buenos Aires and at the Avril gallery in Mexico. In 1977 she held a solo exhibition at the San Diego gallery in Bogotá, culminating the decade with a large exhibition at the OAS headquarters in Washington D.C called Pinturas de María Martorell.
As part of the recognition of her artistic work, on December 22, 1980, the Academy of Fine Arts appointed María Martorell as academic delegate for the province of Salta. In 1982 she held an individual exhibition called The Painter and His Memory, at the Unión Carbide Argentina space in Buenos Aires and in 1985 at the Centoira gallery. In 1989, she received the Artistic Merit award granted by the government of the province of Salta. In 1990, the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires (MAMBA) organized a retrospective exhibition of her work, called From Figuration to Abstraction 1948-1990. During that decade and the next he continued to actively participate in the art scene, both in Buenos Aires and Salta, with various individual and group exhibitions in spaces such as the Recoleta Cultural Center, the Palais de Glace, the MAMBA and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Jump.
On July 26, 2010 she died in the city of Salta. In the 20th edition of ArteBA, a tribute was paid to her called María Martorell: Unchained Energy (1909-2010). In 2013 the Museum of Fine Arts of Salta held the tribute exhibition The Energy of Color, where works from different stages of the artist were presented.