Alejandro Kuropatwa

(Buenos Aires, 1956-2003)
Alejandro Kuropatwa captured with his camera the spirit of an era, the Argentina of the post-dictatorship in the 80s and the Menemist squander of the 90s. Restless, charismatic and irreverent, he cultivated a personality that has been considered inseparable from his work.
He studied photography in New York, at the Fashion Institute of Technology and at the Parsons School of Design. In 1985 he returned to Buenos Aires and set up his own studio where he portrayed countless personalities from the arts, culture and rock music industry. Infected with HIV, his first works addressed with a dramatic and self-referential approach the near certainty of death. In 1996, with the appearance of the retroviral medication, he carried out his Cocktail series, one of the most paradigmatic works of the Argentine art which became an icon of the fight against AIDS. Since then, his images turned to color in large format, a novelty for the artistic photography of that moment, and acquired a more ironic tone. Kuropatwa exhibited his work in the most significant venues of the circuit. He was awarded the Konex Prize in 1996 and 2002, and the Leonardo Prize for Photography Arts in 1996. In 2002 the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes presented Manifiesto, a large retrospective of his work. In 2005, two years after his death, MALBA held the exhibition Kuropatwa in Technicolor, which toured the entire country. The following year he died in Buenos Aires.