Alberto Greco. Viva el arte vivo
Inaugural Conversation between Fernando Davis and Amanda de la Garza

Alberto Greco, Todo de todo (All and Everything), 1964
IVAM Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Generalitat © Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, IVAM
Held on 10 Feb 2026
In conjunction with the opening of the exhibition Alberto Greco. Viva el arte vivo, Fernando Davis, the show’s curator, and Amanda de la Garza, the Museo Reina Sofía’s deputy artist director, will converse in the Nouvel Building’s Auditorium 400 on the life and work of the Argentinian artist, a core figure in experimental avant-garde art.
The title of both exhibition and conversation originates from the proclamation “Long Live Arte Vivo” Alberto Greco (Buenos Aires, 1931— Barcelona, 1965) disseminated around the streets and on the walls of Rome. For Greco, arte vivo was an art of the future, an art based on a set of irreverent and untimely gestures, of adventures open to unpredictability melding with life, and which began in 1962, prior to his coining of the term “vivo-dito”. In his Manifiesto dito dell´arte vivo (Dito Arte-Vivo Manifesto), which he pasted on the walls of Genoa, Greco encouraged new contact “with the living elements of our reality: movement, time, people, conversations, smells, rumours, places, situations”. He would also burst into the everyday of Madrid’s streets as he convened a “vivo-dito moment”, culminating in the burning of a canvas painted collectively in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood.
In addition to founding arte vivo, Alberto Greco was an informalist painter, a queer flâneur, a poet and sometime actor. This intense journey of Greco’s life and art is closely connected to the migrant route he embarked upon in 1950 in Buenos Aires, taking in Atacama and Humahuaca, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Genoa, Rome, Madrid, Piedralaves, New York and Ibiza and ending abruptly in Barcelona, where he took his own life shortly after writing his final great work, the novel Besos brujos (Bewitching Kisses, 1965).
These inaugural conversations, part of the main working strands of the Museo’s Public Programmes Area, aim to explore in greater depth the exhibition narratives of the shows organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.
Programme
Inaugural Conversations
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Collaboration

With the support of

Participants
Fernando Davis
is head lecturer on the Art Theory Chair within the Faculty of Arts at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP) (Argentina), where, since 2012, he has directed research programmes focused on the study of articulations between contemporary artistic practices, queer sexual-political dissidences and forms of social and political agency in images. At UNLP he has also coordinated the Open Chair of Artistic Practices and Sexual Politics and the Art Centre’s Programme in Art Training, Curatorship and Contemporary Theories. Moreover, Davis has curated the exhibitions, among others, La mala letra. Papeles de Alberto Greco (2019); Inventar a la intemperie. Desobediencias sexuales e imaginación política en el arte contemporáneo (2021); Cristina Piffer. Archivos pulsantes, imágenes intempestivas, supervivencias espectrales (2022); Luis Pazos. Poesía vital (2024-2025); and Martha Peluffo. Estados suspensivos (2025). He has been part of the Southern Conceptualisms Network (RedCSur) since 2007 and the University of the Imagination since 2023.
Amanda de la Garza
is the Museo Reina Sofía’s deputy artistic director.
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