biography
Osvaldo Lamborghini was born in Buenos Aires in 1940. In his youth he carries the blessing and the burden of being the younger brother of the writer already consecrated as the Peronist poet par excellence, Leónidas Lamborghini. In the 1960s, he marries for the first and only time Pierangela Taborelli, with whom he has a daughter, Elvira. They lived together for nearly a decade, in a relationship in which literature played a fundamental role. Although Lamborghini already wanted to write, he was instead devoted to family life and militancy in the Peronist trade union movement, a theme that would be important in his later literary work. In 1967, the couple separated and the artist began to live in low-budget hotels in downtown Buenos Aires, wandering from one to another, without a steady job. There, in those impersonal rooms, in the “nuisance of hotel life”, a phrase of the author of Martin Fierro that Lamborghini repeated incessantly, writing is born and he writes his first book: El fiord, published in 1969 in the ghost printing house Ediciones Chinatown. Throughout his life he published only three short books that circulated clandestinely, counterculturally, in photocopies or from hand to hand, making him an early marginal but cult author. Today he is considered one of the most influential and least known writers of contemporary Argentine literature. Among his best friends were César Aira, current candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, the internationally renowned painter Alfredo Prior and the central poet in the national tradition Arturo Carrera.
Lamborghini’s themes circulate between Peronism and its trade union activity, Argentinianness, the Law, class and gender violence, pornographic imagination, revolution, passing these units through his own prose (of a quality unknown until its appearance) and his poetry (which he himself thought of as “cut prose”). The coup d’état of March 24, 1976 in Argentina, added to certain personal issues, pushed him into exile in Barcelona in 1981. There he met Hanna Muck, who would be his partner until her death. In 1983, Lamborghini locks himself in an apartment he shares with Hanna, which he will not leave again until his death. In that year, he wrote as never before, practically 90% of his surviving narrative work. It is the swan song of his literature. At that time, in the Catalan apartment, Lamborghini set up what he called the “little workshop”. There, c. 1984, his writing will become unspecific: he will already be working on the pieces that can be seen in this exhibition, as well as on the Teatro Proletario de Cámara, a written, visual and objectual device of more than 500 pages that contains stories, poems and annotations (typewritten manuscripts), and other drawings, paintings, collages, intervened photographs, illuminated manuscripts and unclassifiable graphic experiments that superimpose writing and plastic arts. He also produces notebooks, books and intervened objects. He died a natural death in Barcelona in November 1985, in his “atelier”.
Osvaldo Lamborghini is internationally recognized as a fundamental writer of 20th century Argentine literature, whose work has been published by the Random House Mondadori group. He has been published by countless Argentine publishing houses, among them Sudamericana, mansalva and the ambitious project of Editorial Nudista to publish for the first time in the country a facsimile, critical, annotated and artistic edition of the emblematic Teatro Proletario de Cámara in several volumes. In Spain, it was first published early in 1988, by Ediciones del Serbal, which marked a strong precedent and a valorization from Europe. In 2008, Hanna Muck and Anxo Rabuñal published for the first time, also from Spain, in a deluxe facsimile edition, Teatro Proletario de Cámara, a historical milestone that marked a crucial precedent, since the book-object was completely unknown and presented a total shift in the figure of Lamborghini, who was known until then merely as a “writer”. In addition, the artist’s work has been translated and published on numerous occasions in English, French and Italian.
In Argentina, his work was staged on several occasions. Highlights include the opera of El fiord, directed by Silvio Lang and with libretto by Ignacio Bartolone in 2016, a commission from the Centro de Experimentación del Teatro Colón; the play La causa justa, with dramaturgy by Mariano Bassi and Cristian Palacios, which has the support of the Instituto Nacional de Teatro, touring since 2017; and the theatrical version of Tadeys, directed by Albertina Carri and Analía Couceyro, premiered in 2020 at the Teatro Nacional Cervantes.
Since it came to light in 2008 that Lamborghini, c. 1984, had produced a huge body of work of unspecific writing, paintings, collages, drawings, notebooks and intervened books, among others, again came from Europe the recognition, and from the first moment he was considered as a plastic artist, put in value for the first time by a far-reaching exhibition of enormous repercussion held at the MACBA in Barcelona in 2015, entitled Teatro Proletario de Cámara, curated by Valentí Roma, with enormous repercussion in the national and international press. Within that framework, a catalog was produced, El sexo que habla, in which artists and critics of the level of César Aira and Paul Preciado coexist with texts that contextualize and revitalize the photographic record of the exhibition’s archive. Years later, certain pieces by the artist were part of the exhibition Oscar Masotta. La teoría como acción (Oscar Masotta. Theory as Action) at MACBA in Barcelona in 2018. Some time later, in Buenos Aires, the artist’s value was corroborated, first, by participating in group shows. One of them was Pornofilia, at the Proa 21 museum in 2019; another, also in 2019, was the aforementioned Oscar Masotta. La teoría como acción, which landed in the country in its itinerancy in a central place: the Parque de la Memoria; finally, in 2022, Lamborghini’s pieces were also exhibited in the show Infieles. Of writers who paint or painters who write. Finally, the moment of his consecration at the state level arrived, and, in 2023, Lamborghini’s first large-scale solo exhibition in Argentina was held in a public cultural center. It was the Kirchner Cultural Center that hosted the exhibition entitled Osvaldo Lamborghini. Material copyist, curated by Paola Cortes Rocca and Agustina Perez.
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Osvaldo Lamborghini
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