Federico Brook at the National Museum of Fine Arts

Brook, born in Buenos Aires in 1933, trained initially in La Plata, then in Rome, where from 1956 he studied sculpture with Alessandro Monteleone and Pericle Fazzini, eventually establishing much of his life and work there. This dual identity—Argentinian by birth, Italian by residence and artistic milieu—permeates the show: a constant tension between rootedness and displacement, between informal gestures and geometrical order, between the intimate and the monumental.

One of the core threads is Brook’s ongoing engagement with the motif of las nubes (“the clouds”). Rossi and Duprat (director of the museum) describe the cloud not just as a recurring shape, but as metaphor: for freedom, for fluidity, for the intangible.

Another powerful tension is Brook’s informalist beginnings: works of twisted, found metal, welded iron, and rugged materiality, which in their ruggedness evoke both the debris of urban Latin America and the gestural freedom of post-war Europe. These early works gradually give way to more geometric, polished forms: mobiles, reflective materials, interplay of voids and solids. It is here that the influence of architectural thinking – how sculpture dialogues with space – becomes clear. The video installation by Paola Sangiovanni, made in 2025, pointing to Brook’s interest in integrating sculpture into the built environment, helps to amplify this dimension.

Federico Brook at the National Museum of Fine Arts

What the exhibition makes clear is that Brook is not simply a transatlantic artist defined by geographic dislocation; his work is deeply engaged, politically and symbolically, with the context of Latin America. The “cloud in a cage” (Nube en jaula) and “cloud free” (Nube libre) pieces born in the 1970s stand as gestures of resistance—repressive regimes, censorship, absence of voice. The cloud becomes both evocation and obstruction.

From a curatorial perspective, María Cristina Rossi does a commendable job balancing breadth and coherence. The progression from informal to geometric, the recurring cloud motif, the juxtaposition of large public works and intimate jewellery pieces—all these generate a rich dialogue without feeling scattershot. The layout of the show allows moments of silence (drawings, delicate works) and moments of awe (the public sculptures, large mobiles). Lighting and spacing seem well handled: fragile works are not overwhelmed; heavy or monumental pieces breathe. Brook himself, present at the opening, remarked on how impressed he was by the mounting: “there is love toward the work, and a desire to impress the spectator”.

If there is a critique, it’s small: some of the documentation and archival context could have been more extensive. For example, more information about how certain works were commissioned, installed, or altered over time would help to deepen the narrative of transnational art, of mobility, and of the material histories. Also, while the cloud motif is well presented, its symbolic multiplicities—technological modernity, meteorological metaphor, dream, political sky—could perhaps have been more explicitly teased out.

Federico Brook at the National Museum of Fine Arts

Overall, Federico Brook. “Entre Roma y Latinoamérica” is a powerful retrospective: one that does not merely celebrate an individual artist, but uses his life and work to ask broader questions about identity, exile, space, and the possibilities of form between continents. For anyone interested in sculpture, abstraction, or Latin American modernism, it is a must-see. It reminds us that the boundary between continents is often porous, and great art can dwell productively in those in-between zones.

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