M HKA HISTORY

VISITOR'S GUIDE

Designer Jelle Jespers examines graphic design and print as artistic practices in Argentina between 1940 and 1976. In this period, print culture became a vital space for ideas. Designers, artists and thinkers used printed matter to experiment with form, language, politics and society.

Antwerp played a surprisingly prominent role in this transnational exchange. The abstract forms developed by Georges Vantongerloo inspired the Argentine designer Tomás Maldonado in shaping a new modernist visual language. In the 1960s, the paths of Antwerp poet Paul De Vree and artist-publisher Edgardo Antonio Vigo crossed, both key figures in the field of visual poetry. From the 1970s onwards, artist Jorge Glusberg worked closely with Flor Bex and Antwerp's ICC, from which M HKA emerged.

The catalogues, magazines, publications and posters gathered in this archival presentation show how graphic design evolved from a craft into a professional discipline. Typography and print became carriers of new artistic and social ideas. Nueva Visión tells a story of exchange, imagination and formal ambition across continents.

Curated by Jelle Jespers, in collaboration with Jan De Vree

M HKA presents visual art archives in a programme of rotating displays. These presentations are essential not only to the preservation and accessibility of artistic legacies, but also to the generation of new research.