Argentine painter Carlos Alonso dies at 97 in Córdoba

Carlos Alonso, the painter whose work captured the violence and suffering of the country’s turbulent recent history, has died aged 97 at his home in Unquillo, Córdoba, his family said on Monday.

One of the defining figures of 20th-century Argentine art, Alonso developed an expressionist style centred on the human body and its suffering, using images of flesh, violence and sacrifice to explore poverty, inequality and political conflict.

Alonso’s art was deeply shaped by political repression and the disappearance of his daughter Paloma during Argentina’s 1976-1983 military dictatorship, themes he explored through stark and often unsettling images of the human body.

“His work and his legacy will remain forever,” his family said in a statement posted on the artist’s Instagram account.

Born on February 4, 1929, in Tunuyán, Mendoza, Alonso began his artistic training in 1944 at the University of Cuyo’s Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied under Sergio Sergi, Lorenzo Domínguez and Francisco Bernareggi.

In 1950 he moved to Tucumán and joined a group led by renowned painter Lino Enea Spilimbergo, an experience that proved decisive in his artistic development.

Three years later he travelled to Europe, where he encountered the work of masters including Diego Velázquez and Vincent van Gogh. Their influence would reappear in his work over the following decades.

In 1957, Alonso won first prize in a competition to illustrate the second part of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. In 1968 he temporarily moved to Florence, where he worked on illustrations for Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy.

By the late 1960s, his work had increasingly focused on the relationship between the body and power. His Lección de anatomía series, inspired by Rembrandt, explored the violence inflicted on the human body, while works connected to Esteban Echeverría’s El matadero drew parallels between the human body, meat and sacrifice.

Argentina's brutal military dictatorship (1976-83) marked Alonso’s life and work profoundly. A bomb threat interrupted his exhibition El ganado y lo perdido at the beginning of the dictatorship and forced him into exile in Europe, where he lived first in Italy and later in Spain.

In 1977, his 21-year-old daughter Paloma was abducted and disappeared. The tragedy became a defining element of Alonso’s subsequent work, including his acclaimed Manos anónimas series, which addressed state terrorism and political violence.

Alonso returned to Argentina in 1980 and settled in Unquillo, where he lived for the rest of his life. He later helped establish the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in the Córdoba town.

His recognition extended well beyond Argentina. His work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the Venice Biennale, as well as in galleries in London, Mexico City and Havana, and was sold at international auctions.

His career brought numerous honours, including the Konex Platinum Awards in 1982 and 1992. In 2019, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires held a major exhibition reviewing his work and its dialogue with the history of painting.

Alonso’s works are held in the collections of major Argentine institutions including the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires and the Museo Carlos Alonso-Mansión Stoppel in Mendoza.

In his later years, his focus gradually expanded beyond the violence and political conflict that had defined much of his career. In 2025, he held his final exhibition in Unquillo, devoted to a less widely known aspect of his work: his relationship with the landscapes of Córdoba.

“I continue to believe in art and, above all, in its incorruptible memory, not sentimental but capable of fixing the wounds that reality leaves in us,” Alonso wrote in August while presenting an exhibition.

– TIMES/AFP