Alicia Penalba (San Pedro, Province of Buenos Aires, 1913- Saint Geours de Maremme, France, 1982)

She studied at the “Ernesto de la Cárcova” Higher School of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires. In 1948 she traveled to Paris on a scholarship to continue her training. There her work underwent a great change, she discovered herself as a sculptor and attended Ossip Zadkine’s workshop. In 1951 she made her first non-figurative sculpture and then systematically destroyed her previous pieces. After her, her first personal sculptures came to light, the Totems that rise in space, dialoguing with nature. Penalba’s sculpture is characterized by abstract, autonomous, plastic forms, metaphors of psychic and spiritual behavior, erotic figures or symbols fed by myths. In 1957 she presented her totem bronzes in the first solo exhibition; She participated in the II Documenta, Kassel, in 1959 and two years later, in 1961, she received the Grand Prize at the São Paulo Biennial. During the 1960s she matured her series of winged sculptures. In 1964 she participated in the III Documenta. In 1968, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris inaugurated Totems et tabous. Lam, Matta, Penalba, exhibition shared with two other masters of Latin American art. In 1977, the same museum organized a major retrospective of her work. In 1963, in a successful collaboration with architecture, she created a monumental sculptural group for the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. Her work integrates public space and social space.