An innovator of Conceptual art in New York during in the 1960’s, Luis Camnitzer is a German-born Uruguayan artist best known for his use of language in printmaking, sculpture, and installation. Characterized by a biting humor and political charge, his practice investigates power structures through the lenses of communication, social injustice, and institutional critique. A co-founder of New York Graphics Workshop, Camnitzer also pushed the medium of printmaking into experimental directions.

A series of the artist’s early works consists of adhesive labels printed with absurd architectural proposals such as, “Ten story building with Styrofoam flowing out of the windows.” This project developed into Living Room (1968), a interior space defined entirely by printed adhesive labels outlining windows, desk, bookcase, carpet, etc. During the 1970s, Camnitzer began to pair text with visuals by placing objects in a wood-framed boxes with brass plaques labels. By 1983-4, he had translated this composition onto paper for From the Uruguayan Torture Series , a work that draws upon Latin America’s long history of political printmaking by blatantly addressing the Desaparecidos atrocities in his home country.

Camnitzer’s work has been exhibited internationally for over four decades, including solo exhibitions at El Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, Santiago, Chile, Art in General, New York, NY, The Kitchen, New York, NY, Museo Blanes, Montevideo, Uruguay, Museo Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, and List Visual Arts Center at M.I.T. in Cambridge, MA. Retrospectives of his work have been presented at Lehman College Art Gallery in the Bronx, NY, Kunsthalle Kiel, Germany, Daros Museum in Zurich, Switzerland, El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY, and Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, Bogotá, Colombia. His work was included in the seminal Information show at The Museum of Modern Art in 1970, and he was the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowships on two occasions, 1961 and 1982.