b. 1924, Košice, Czechoslovakia

d. 2016, Buenos Aires

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Gyula Kosice was born Fernand Fallik in Košice, Slovakia in 1924, but his parents immigrated to Argentina when he was only a child.  He adopted the name Gyula Kosice as a tribute to his hometown.  Kosice is an Argentine writer, plastic artist, theoretician, and poet.  Along with Carmelo Arden-Quin, he founded the Madí movement and wrote the “Madí Manifest” in 1946.  Later on he also participated in the abstract-only Arte Concreto-Invención movement. He is considered one of the vanguards of kinetic and luminance art, being one of the first to experiment with new materials and abstraction.  He studied drawing and modeling at three different academies. In 1946, he created luminance structures with neon gas, used for the first time in the worldwide plane.  In 1949, he also became the innovator behind the hydraulic sculpture, and he uses the water as an essential element in his works. He also held the Retrospective Exhibition "A Hundred Works of Kosice, a Forerunner" at the Di Tella Institute (1968) and the Retrospective Exhibition in the National Museum of Fine Arts (1991) in Buenos Aires.  Also worthy of note is Kosice’s participation in the “Multiple Modernities” exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2014.  He was given a whole room to exhibit his work, which included his notable 1944 “Röyi” wooden sculpture, considered today one of the pieces that paved the way to Argentinean abstraction.


He has also published 14 books of essays and poetry and has made 30 personal exhibitions and participated in more than 600 group exhibitions. He was distinguished as "Caballero de las Artes y las Letras" (Lord of the Arts and Literature) by the government of France and named Honorary Citizen of the City of Buenos Aires. Lastly, he made monumental sculptures, hidro-spatial routes, and hydro-murals. His works appear in museums and private collections in Argentina, Latin America, the United States, Europe, and Asia.