Ernesto Deira

Ernesto Deira was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1928. He studied law at the University of Buenos Aires, graduating in 1950. During the mid-1950s, amid a period of cultural and political instability in Argentina, he began to devote himself to painting. By the end of the decade, he had moved away from legal practice and into the art world.

At a time when abstraction dominated much of contemporary art, Nueva Figuración brought the human figure back into painting. The group formed around a shared dissatisfaction with both abstraction and academic realism, using figuration to respond to violence and conflict visible in newspapers, photographs, and everyday media rather than to pursue formal experimentation. This commitment to figuration remained central to Deira’s work even as new artistic tools emerged. In 1969, Deira became a member of the Grupo de Arte y Cibernética Buenos Aires, formed within the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC). The group, which was active until the early 1970s, brought together artists, programmers, and engineers to work with early computing technologies and was developed following exchanges with international computer-art groups, including Japan’s Computer Technique Group. During this period, Deira produced computer-based screenprints using computer-assisted processes.

As a member of Nueva Figuración, Deira participated in group exhibitions in Buenos Aires that positioned the movement as a key force in Argentine painting in the early 1960s. He also showcased computer-based works with the Grupo de Arte y Cibernética Buenos Aires, including the 1969 Arte y Cibernética exhibition at Galería Bonino. Deira held solo exhibitions in Argentina and abroad, with presentations in Buenos Aires as well as in Caracas, Washington, D.C., Brussels, Paris, and Rome. In 1971, he presented the series Identificaciones at Galería Carmen Waugh in Buenos Aires, a group of black-and-white paintings addressing political violence and repression across Latin America. Believed to have been destroyed by the Chilean government under Pinochet's dictatorship, the series later became central to his legacy following its recovery decades after his death. His career included a Fulbright Fellowship that brought him to the United States as a visiting professor at Cornell University in 1966 and the Premio Palanza awarded by the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes in 1967. His work is held in public collections including the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes and the Tate. He passed away in 1986.