Antonio Segui

Antonio Segui was born on 11 January 1934 in Villa Allende, in the province of Cordoba, Argentina. Sources vary on the exact timing of his early legal and artistic studies in Cordoba during the 1950s; he studied law there without completing a degree before turning fully to art. In the early 1950s he traveled to Europe, where he attended the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid and the Ecole nationale superieure des beaux-arts in Paris as a visiting student, in painting and sculpture, without completing a degree at either.

Segui moved permanently to France in 1963 and settled in Arcueil, near Paris, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life. His work, rooted in figuration, developed into instantly recognizable scenes of faceless, hurrying men navigating dense, satirical cityscapes, a vocabulary he applied across painting, printmaking, and sculpture. He built an extensive exhibition record over six decades, including two appearances at the Venice Biennale (1964 and 1984), the 1987 Sao Paulo Biennial, and retrospectives at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires (1991), the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2005, works on paper), and the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (2011). He received numerous international honors, including print biennial prizes in Lodz (1967) and Krakow (1980), the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella grand prize (1989), Argentina's Fondo Nacional de las Artes grand prize (1990), and recognition in France as Chevalier (1983) and later Officier (2018) of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Segui died on 26 February 2022 at the German Hospital in Buenos Aires, at the age of 88. Major obituaries, including in Le Monde and citing the Argentine newspaper La Nacion, attribute his death to cardiac complications following hip surgery.

Segui built his reputation less through a single defining review than through sustained institutional and biennial recognition across more than five decades. He represented a distinctly Latin American strand of postwar figuration, and his repeated inclusion in the Venice Biennale, the Sao Paulo Biennial, and international print and graphic biennials in Lodz, Krakow, and San Juan built an international profile from the 1960s onward. Retrospectives at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires confirmed his standing within both Argentine and French institutional programming, and France recognized him first as Chevalier (1983) and later as Officier (2018) of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. No exact, attributable critical quotation could be confirmed for this profile, so none is reproduced here.

Segui's auction market is anchored by a single standout Argentine sale rather than a deep run of major international results. His documented auction high is Caja de senores (also cited as Caja con senores), which sold at auction in Buenos Aires in 2019; the specific auction house and exact calendar date could not be independently confirmed. Argentine government and press sources reported a price around USD 224,000 to 229,000, while the art-market outlet Estimarte reported a final total price of USD 262,297 including buyer's premium and fees, describing it as the most significant auction result ever achieved for the artist and exceeding his prior results at international houses. Argentine government sources described the sale as a record price at auction in Argentina, though it is unclear whether this refers to a record for Segui specifically or for any artwork sold at auction nationally. Outside this sale, reported results for Segui's work at auction have generally been in the low to mid five-figure range.

No catalogue raisonne of Segui's work has been identified, and no single gallery or institution has been confirmed as the official representative of his estate; galleries including Opera Gallery and Galerie Loft in Paris currently exhibit and sell his work on the secondary market, alongside editioned tapestry and rug interpretations of his imagery. Collectors should also treat his auction record with some care: press accounts of the 2019 Buenos Aires sale of Caja de senores diverge by tens of thousands of dollars depending on whether the figure quoted is the hammer price or the total price with premium, the auction house and exact date are not independently confirmed, and that sale sits well above the level of most of his other reported auction results. Given the absence of a catalogue raisonne and a confirmed estate authority, provenance research and gallery consultation are especially important before acquisition.