Miguel Ángel Vidal

Miguel Ángel Vidal was born in Buenos Aires in 1928 and lived and worked in the city throughout his life. He studied at the Prilidiano Pueyrredón National School of Fine Arts (today IUNA Visual Arts), graduating in 1952 as Professor of Visual Arts. Vidal taught drawing and painting at the Prilidiano Pueyrredón School and later served as its Dean from 1989 to 1991. He also taught painting and acted as thesis director at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes Ernesto de la Cárcova. In parallel, he worked as a graphic designer, printmaker, and illustrator, designing publications for cultural institutions such as the National Academy of Fine Arts, and contributing to editorial, educational, and applied visual projects.

By the late 1950s, Vidal was using straight lines as the primary element in his abstract work, building complex compositions from simple, repeated forms. In 1959, he co-founded the Buenos Aires Generative Art movement with Eduardo Mac Entyre, a fellow Argentine painter who explored geometric abstraction. Their work focused on systems in which form developed through repetition and gradual change, creating visual depth and optical movement within structured compositions. Vidal worked with a limited set of elements, using lines to create variation, depth, and spatial tension. Vidal became a founding member of the Grupo de Arte y Cibernética Buenos Aires in 1969, an interdisciplinary group formed around the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAyC). Working at the ORT Schools Calculation Center, part of Argentina’s Organización ORT technical education network, he produced computer-assisted works that translated his existing visual systems into a computational setting. These projects place him among the early artists in Argentina to work directly with cybernetics and digital processes, using new technologies to extend his ongoing exploration of structure, order, and perception.

His participation in biennials and touring exhibitions brought his work to audiences across Latin America, Europe, and the United States. Throughout his career, he received multiple national awards and distinctions, among them the Premio Konex for painting and the Gran Premio de Honor at Argentina’s Salón Nacional. His work is held in major museum collections in Argentina and internationally, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Vidal passed away in Buenos Aires in 2009.