Eduardo Mac Entyre

Eduardo Mac Entyre was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1929 to a Scottish father and Belgian mother. He began developing his artistic skills around age twenty, inspired by classic artists like Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein, and Rembrandt. While mostly self-taught, he also studied industrial mechanical drawing and worked as a graphic and industrial designer early in his career. He started out as a graphic and industrial designer before committing fully to his art practice.

His first public exhibition took place in Buenos Aires in 1954, and he quickly became a recognized figure within the city’s vibrant art community. By 1959, his work had caught the attention of influential figures, including the director of the Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art. Mac Entyre was a pioneer of “Generative Art” in 1960s Buenos Aires, coining the term with fellow artists to describe a new visual language rooted in rhythm, movement, and self-contained systems. In 1960, he and Miguel Ángel Vidal formalized this vision with a manifesto, marking the birth of the “Arte Generativo” movement. The generative paintings he produced throughout this period relied on self-defined systems, repeated curves, and incremental shifts in form, creating structures that resembled algorithmic processes before he ever worked with computers. Mac Entyre and Vidal later helped found the Grupo de Arte y Cibernética in 1969, an interdisciplinary collective of artists and technologists exploring the intersection of art and emerging technologies until its disbandment in 1973. At the Computer Center of the ORT Technical School in Buenos Aires, he worked with engineers to produce early computer-generated prints using an IBM 1130 computer and an IBM 1627 plotter, placing him among the first Argentine artists to work with digital tools. His works evoked motion and internal logic, combining precision with randomness in ways that anticipated digital aesthetics. While best known for these geometric abstractions, his practice also included figurative and Cubist-inspired works, sculptural collaborations, and experiments with transparency and color.

His work reached far beyond the borders of Argentina, becoming part of major museum collections including the MoMA, the Victoria and Albert Museum, RISD, and the OAS in Washington, D.C. He exhibited internationally, with shows at El Museo del Barrio, MACBA, and the Neuberger Museum. His computer-generated prints were included in early exhibitions of Argentine computer art, such as Arte y Cibernética in 1969 at Galería Bonino, and in later presentations organized by the Centro de Arte y Comunicación. In 2000, a painting titled Cristo la luz was donated to the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Mac Entyre passed away in 2014.