(Buenos Aires, 1956-2003)

Alejandro Kuropatwa captured with his camera the spirit of an era, the post-dictatorship Argentina of the 80s and the Menemist excess of the 90s. Restless, charismatic and irreverent, he cultivated a personality that has been considered inseparable from his work. After a brief period at the Manuel Belgrano School of Fine Arts, he studied drawing and painting in the workshops of Jorge Dermijian and Oscar Smoje. In 1979 he settled in New York to study photography at the Fashion Institute of Technology and then a master’s degree at the Parsons School of Design. In 1985 he returned to Buenos Aires where he established his studio and portrayed countless art, culture and rock personalities.
In his early works he experimented with the photographic medium, seeking to subvert traditional genres and canons. With the news of his HIV positive diagnosis, in the early 90’s his photography acquired a dramatic and self-referential tone in the face of the near certainty of death. In 1996, with the appearance of antiretroviral medication, he made his series Cóctel, one of the first works to address frontally the issue of AIDS in Argentina. Since then, his images turned to color in large format, an innovation for artistic photography at that time, and explored the construction of female identity.
Kuropatwa exhibited his work in the most significant spaces of the art circuit. In 2002 the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes presented Manifiesto, an extensive retrospective dedicated to her work. The following year he died in Buenos Aires.