Born in Rosario, Argentina, Antonio Berni is a central figure in 20th-century Argentinean art. Berni studied drawing in Rosario in 1916 while apprenticing in a stained-glass workshop. In 1925, he earned a scholarship to study painting in Europe. Settling in Paris for five years, he was deeply influenced by the Surrealist movement. Returning to Argentina in 1930, Berni exhibited his own Surrealist paintings, which were poorly received by critics. Soon after, his paintings, including murals, shifted to a more realist style and focused on social reform. In the 1950s, Berni abandoned his social realist style, although he continued to create art with social and political themes. In 1958, he began a series of prints, collages, and assemblages incorporating garbage and found objects, based on two characters he invented, Juanito Laguna, a street urchin, and Ramona Montiel, a prostitute. Berni created the prints using an innovative technique that used impressions left on paper by trash arranged as pictures. These won him the Grand Prize for Printmaking at the 1962 Venice Biennale. In subsequent work, Berni began to collage found materials onto canvas, enhancing them with paint to create large format works. Later, he transformed his work with scrap metal and waste into sculptural assemblages that featured two themes: La sordidez (Sordidness, 1964) and Voracidad (Voracity, 1965), in a series called Monstruos cósmicos (Cosmic Monsters). Berni returned to a more conventional style of painting in the 1970s but throughout his life continued to make works addressing poverty.
Reaching just over five feet in length this urban creature was created from the refuse of modern society. Bent and rusty nails fill out its bristling head and neck, ragged shards of wood stand up from its crawling spine, while decayed and rotten plant roots encrust its back. Its wide open mouth reveals jagged, uneven teeth, created from pieces of plastic ice cube trays, and a thrusting reptilian tongue made from a splintered piece of wood. Like a rat scouring through alley trash bins, this “sordid,” wretched monster appears too intent on finding its next meal to notice the shock and disgust with which it is received. To Berni, La Sordidez is a universal allegory for the degradation and corruption of modern society caused by endemic poverty.
The theme of this assemblage sculpture is conveyed by both the materials used and the subject matter itself. Berni chose man-made materials and natural refuse marked by age and deterioration. He assembled and arranged these waste products of society into the shape of a monster that exists only because of such waste.
From the mid-1950s into the early 1960s, Argentina underwent rapid economic development, accelerated after the downfall of President Juan Domingo Perón in 1955 and financed by infusions of foreign capital. These were “boom” years in Argentina; an expansive and optimistic mood prevailed throughout the country, especially in Buenos Aires. With expanded access to consumer goods, many people, including Argentinean Pop artists, celebrated consumer culture much in the same way artists like Andy Warhol did in the United States. However, there were others, including Berni, who were more concerned that the infusions of capital were not reaching those with the greatest needs. They spoke out against the negative aspects of rapid economic development, the emptiness of a materialistic society, and the ever-increasing gap between the rich and the poor.
