Fernando Maza

Fernando Maza (Buenos Aires, 1936 – Nogent-sur‑Marne, France, January 16, 2017) was an Argentine artist of international stature. Born into an architectural family, he trained between 1949 and 1953 under Raúl Podestá. In 1957 he began exhibiting in Buenos Aires, assimilating painting and graphic arts. In 1959 he co-founded the Argentine Informalist Movement, embracing gestural abstraction in his early works.

In the early 1960s, Maza earned a Pan American Union grant to study graphic arts at the Pratt Graphic Art Center in New York. This marked the evolution of his style, blending architecture and typography: letters, numbers, and symbols floated within enigmatic architectural spaces. His influences ranged from New York Pop to Neo-Dadaism.

He won awards at the São Paulo Biennial in 1965 and the Cali Art Festival in 1968. Thanks to a Guggenheim fellowship (1971), he spent summers in Cala Deià, Mallorca, lived in London (1973–1976), then settled in France for the remainder of his life.

From 1975 onwards, his signature poetic language emerged: metaphysical landscapes featuring arcades, walls, floating shadows, and cryptic signs. He abandoned titles to preserve works’ openness. In the 1980s he alternated symbolic architectural scenes with Mediterranean landscapes—painted in Mallorca—where surreal figures hovered between reality and fantasy.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, his paintings became pared-down and minimalist: solitary architectural forms lost residential function and became autonomous geometric presences (cubes, prisms, monoliths) in wide open, silent spaces. These works evoke metaphysical silence, echoing De Chirico yet imbued with Morandi’s contemplative sensibility.

Artistic journey: from gestural mark‑making to cognitive architecture—through enigmatic forms. By 2007, his exhibitions had cemented his reputation as an artist who fused architecture, writing, and metaphysics in suspended spaces at the intersection of reality and symbol.