The Argentine-born artist Julio Le Parc, a pioneer of kinetic art whose work helped redefine the role of the viewer, died on 30 May at the age of 97 in Paris, where he had lived since the late 1950s.
Despite his declining health, Le Parc had hoped to travel to London for the opening of Light. Colour. Action, a major exhibition at Tate Modern devoted to his work (11 June-3 May 2027). Bringing together more than 60 works, the show spans seven decades of a career dedicated to rethinking the relationships between art, space and audience.
Le Parc transformed light, colour and movement into more than working materials. For him, these were ways of thinking. He co-founded the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (Grav) and was one of the first living Latin American artists to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. His work challenged passive contemplation and proposed a more physical, playful and democratic experience of art.
Born in the province of Mendoza in 1928, Le Parc grew up in a working-class family. His talent for drawing was recognised early on by a schoolteacher, and his mother enrolled him in art classes. “That’s when I started drawing, and that’s when I realised this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life,” he recalled years later. Le Parc soon became interested in the avant-garde movements then emerging in Buenos Aires, including Concrete Art and Lucio Fontana’s Spatialism.
Installation view of Julio Le Parc’s Ensemble of Eleven Surprise Movements (1967) at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, in 2013 Photo: André Morin. © ADAGP, Paris, and DACS, London
In 1958, Le Parc received a scholarship from the French government to study in Paris. His arrival in Europe marked the beginning of an exploration he would never abandon: movement, light, colour, perception and active public participation. These ideas would later run through Grav’s 1961 manifesto, Propositions sur le mouvement.
Together with his colleagues at Grav, Le Parc challenged the dominant artistic tradition, moving away from static painting towards works that change with movement, light and the presence of people. Using mirrors, reflection and mobile elements, he created pieces that altered the space around them and invited spectators to become participants.
In 1966, Le Parc won the International Grand Prize for Painting at the 33rd Venice Biennale. It was a landmark achievement that established him as a preeminent Latin American artist of his generation. The award surprised the international art world, which had widely seen the American artist Roy Lichtenstein as the favourite to win.
Le Parc never limited his work to a single technique or medium. “If you have an idea, a proposal, a strong thought, what remains is the reflection it produces,” he said. “The medium used to create it is irrelevant. And it is no guarantee of quality.”
Among his most significant exhibitions in Argentina was Julio Le Parc: Un visionario at the Centro Cultural Kirchner in Buenos Aires in 2019. Curated by Gabriela Urtiaga—currently the chief curator at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California—the retrospective brought together more than 160 works created over six decades and attracted half a million visitors, a record for the museum.
Installation view of Julio Le Parc’s Blue Sphere (2013) at the Museum of Art Pudong, Shanghai, in 2022 Photo: © Museum of Art Pudong. © ADAGP, Paris, and DACS, London
In 2014, Le Parc became a Knight of the French Legion of Honour. Two years later, he had his first museum retrospective in the US at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Speaking to The Art Newspaper around the time of that exhibition, he described the political and social role he had long assigned to the viewer.
“In our manifesto, we wrote that, if there is to be a transformation in contemporary art, the viewer must not be left out of it,” he said. “Because in that moment—and even now—the viewer didn’t count for anything. The viewer is never taken into account in the evaluation of contemporary art. They don’t have the means of expressing themselves, [unlike] people with money, who can pay and give a monetary value to a painting.”
That idea will be at the centre of Tate Modern’s new exhibition, curated by Val Ravaglia and Francis Hardy and organised in close collaboration with the artist and his studio. Conceived as a winding, almost labyrinthine journey, the show will revisit the early optical experiments Le Parc developed after his arrival in Paris, his celebrated kinetic works, interactive installations and explorations of colour. The inclusion of Blue Sphere (2013), acquired by Tate in 2024, will connect his later work with the early experiments that established Le Parc as a central figure in international kinetic art.
The Tate retrospective will now open without him, but it extends one of the central ideas of his life’s work: art only becomes complete when the audience enters into it.
