As part of El Museo’s FOCOS series on groundbreaking, mature, yet under-recognized artists, this traveling retrospective shone a light on three decades of work by the conceptual artist and writer Luis Camnitzer.

Born in Germany in 1937, raised in Uruguay, and working in New York for the past three decades, Camnitzer creates a variety of media, from installations, prints and drawings to photographs, that expose our collective indifference to the violence of governments toward individuals.

A pioneer of conceptual art, Camnitzer critiques current political realities from a perspective that is informed by his first-hand experience of dictatorships in Latin America. At the heart of his work is the idea that artists are not so much creators of paintings or sculptures but “primarily ethical beings sifting right from wrong and just from unjust.”

Curators: Hans-Michael Herzog, Katrin Steffen