He studied Law in Buenos Aires, where he obtained a doctorate in 1960. In 1961 he traveled to London to pursue postgraduate studies; There he resides for more than seventeen years, in different periods. In 1963 he worked in the BBC’s foreign services making radio programs in Spanish. The following year he abandoned the law and took training in theater directing at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. At the same time, she begins her interest in cinema. Her first film, Men in Silence (1964), is chosen as the most important short film of the year at the London Film Festival.
She returned to Buenos Aires, and between 1965 and 1966 she participated in the happenings and experiences of the Torcuato Di Tella Institute, along with artists such as David Lamelas, Marta Minujín and Pablo Suárez. In 1965 she made a film about La menesunda, by Marta Minujín and Rubén Santantonín. The following year she staged Little Broken Riding Hood (1966), a play with a slide projection, fourteen dancers and a radio announcer, in the auditorium of the Torcuato Di Tella Institute. Here she began to become interested in directing dancers, and since the end of the decade, her work has slipped between theater, dance and the plastic arts.
In 1967 she made the ironic Exhibition of an inauguration at the Rubbers Gallery, in which she sought to create a “climate” through images; She calls these types of proposals “situations.”
That same year she returned to London. In 1969 she was commissioned to make an experimental ballet for the opening of The Place, a theater dedicated to contemporary dance run by the Contemporary Dance Company (a branch of the Martha Graham Company). Maler collaborates with this group for more than two years, developing experimental choreographies with hydraulic machinery, projections, smoke and inflatable volumes, among other elements. The result of that commission is X-IT (1969), a piece based on the collaboration between machines and dancers.
In 1970 he directed Playback 625 at the Court Theater, whose script he wrote with N. F. Simpson. The following year he performed Crane Ballet (1971) in a public square, within the framework of the Camdem Art Festival in London, a work in which dancers and acrobats perform an aerial dance, hanging from cranes that produce choreographic movements designed by the artist. Also that year he presented Silence (1971), an installation that includes a performance and a projection, and which constitutes a precursor to current video installations.
In 1973 he lives in Paris. In 1975 he taught at the Hornsey College of Arts, in a department called “Fourth Dimension”, where he taught video, performance and multimedia. He is also a visiting professor at the Association of Architects in London.
In 1976 he presented the installation Mortal Issues at Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. The following year he received a scholarship from the Guggenheim Foundation and moved to New York. This city generated great enthusiasm in him, so he settled there until 1984. In 1977 he presented the installation The Last Supper, as part of the collective project of the CAYC Group for the XIV International Biennial of São Paulo. The proposal wins the Itamaraty Grand Prize of that edition.
In 1978 he exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art of Brazil together with the Group of 13, and obtained a special mention from the jury in the exhibition Arte Argentino 78, held at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires. The following year he produced Five Easy Pieces, a performance and video installation exhibited at the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the performance Jurisdiction, executed within the framework of an international meeting at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice.
Between 1979 and 1981 he was appointed external examining professor at Hornsey College of Arts in London. In 1980 he performed the performance Fuoco Forma Forno in St. Mark’s Square, in the context of the XXXIV Venice Biennale. The following year he exhibited at the Palais de Beaux Arts in Lausanne, Sweden; He presents a performance in the Plaza de Toros de Macarena, Medellín (along with Marta Minujín), and exhibits the installation The Last Supper at the Rufino Tamayo Museum in Mexico. In 1982 he obtained the Konex and Gandhi awards for Social Communication in Buenos Aires.
Between 1983 and 1985 he was dean and professor at the Parsons School of Design (Latin America division) in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Since then he has been a visiting professor at universities and institutes in different countries. In Santo Domingo he installed a residency for artists, where numerous Latin American plastic artists visited.
In 1986 he obtained the Arawak Prize for the best foreign art show in Santo Domingo, and participated in the Argentine Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Two years later he co-founded the Napa Contemporary Art Foundation with collector Donald Hess, an organization that develops new ideas in the arts and education, in partnership with the universities of Berkeley, San Francisco and Sonoma. And that same year he made a monumental sculpture in the Seoul Olympic Sculpture Park on the occasion of the Games held in the city.
In 1992 he received a decoration for artistic merit from the mayor of Madrid, due to the monumental work Los cantos de la encrucijada, commissioned by the Spanish government. Two years later she created a monument on the island of Guadeloupe commissioned by the French government, and in 1996 she obtained the Grand Prize from the University of San Juan of Puerto Rico in a competition for the creation of a monument.
In 2002 she created a monument in Suwon, on the occasion of the World Cup in South Korea, and in 2003 she completed a monumental sculpture for the city of Santo Tirso, in Porto, Portugal. The following year he presented Metrobolismo in San Juan de Puerto Rico, a performance that celebrated the centenary of the university of that city, in which he concentrated 150 cars of three colors – white, red and yellow – in three separate points of the city, guiding their itineraries by radio and from a helicopter that flies over the area, photographing the event every three minutes.
In 2005 she inaugurated the exhibition Artodelharte at the Museum of Modern Art of Santo Domingo, and in 2009, a retrospective of her production at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) of Puerto Rico. Currently, she has her main studio in the east of the Dominican Republic, in an isolated fishing village.
She lives and works in Santo Domingo, but frequently travels to Miami, San Francisco and Buenos Aires.