Side Gallery

Tomas Maldonado was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1922. He studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts. He is remembered for his furniture designs and art but most of all for his theories and teaching, on industrial design. During the early 1940s in collaboration with Jorge Brito, Alfredo Hlito and Claudio Girola, he signed a manifesto rejecting the selected collection designed for the National Salon, he quoted the Italian Carlo Carrá affirming: "It is essential to suppress the imbeciles in art".

During the same decade he cooperated in the publication of the magazine Arturo (1944), for which he made the engraving that illustrated the cover. At the end of 1945 he founded the Concrete Art-Invention Association with Raúl Lozza, Alfredo Hlito, Manuel Espinosa, Lidy Prati, Antonio Caraduje, Enio Iommi, Jorge Souza, Alberto Molenberg, Simón Contreras, Oscar Núñez, Rembrandt Van Dyck Lozza, Rafael Lozza , Primaldo Monaco. Together with his brother, the poet Edgar Bayley, he wrote the Inventionist Manifesto published in conjunction with the Association's first exhibition in March 1946. The manifesto reappeared in the magazine Arte Concreto Invención whose first edition came out in the following August. It included, several articles by Maldonado in which he reflected on concretism.

Two years later he traveled to Europe where he met Max Bill and Georges Vantongerloo.
In 1951, together with Alfredo Hlito, he contributed to the Nueva Visión magazine. Slowly but surely his ideas and interests moved away from the "fine arts" and towards design, by the mid-1950s, he definitively abandoned painting.

In 1954 he was invited by Max Bill to teach at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, Germany. He remained in there until 1967, serving as director of the institution. Between 1967 and 1969 he chaired the Executive Committee of the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design. In 1971, he was appointed Professor of Environmental Planning at the University of Bologna, Italy.

From his abundant theoretical production, the texts written from 1946 to 1974, compiled with Vanguard and Rationality, stand out. In 1984 he visited Argentina where he promoted the creation of Graphic Design and Industrial Design careers at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of Buenos Aires.

In the mid-eighties he was appointed Honorary Professor at the University of Buenos Aires and between 1992 and 1997 he worked as Consultant Professor and Director of the Industrial Design Department at Milan Polytechnic, where he died in 2018.

Important group exhibitions were: Tribute to the Argentine avant-garde of the 1940s , held at the Galería Arte Nuevo (1976), Avant-gardes of the 1940s. Concrete Art-Invention. Madí art. Perceptism in the Eduardo Sívori Museum (1980), Argentina. Concrete Art Invention 1945. Grupo Madí 1946 at the Rachel Adler Gallery, New York (1990) and, recently, Abstract art from Río de la Plata. Buenos Aires and Montevideo 1933/53 in The Americas Society, New York, 2001.