Juan Mele

Juan Nicolas Mele was born on October 15, 1923, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He began studying drawing and painting privately with the artist Enrique Rodriguez around 1934 to 1935, at age eleven. He went on to study at the Escuela de Bellas Artes Manuel Belgrano in Buenos Aires from the late 1930s to 1945, and subsequently at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredon, completing his training around 1945. He later taught art and, from 1950, art history at the same institution.

In 1946 he joined the Asociacion Arte Concreto-Invencion, the group at the center of Argentine concrete art, and he went on to co-found Grupo Arte Nuevo. In 1948 the French government awarded him a scholarship to study at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris, where he remained through 1949. During this period he came into contact with figures including Georges Vantongerloo, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Cesar Domela, Constantin Brancusi, Max Bill, and Michel Seuphor, an experience that reinforced his commitment to abstraction.

Mele represented Argentina at the 2nd Sao Paulo Bienal in 1953. He later lived and worked in New York from 1974 to 1986 before dividing his time between Buenos Aires and Paris. In 1997 he received the Alberto J. Trabucco Prize from the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes, and in 2002 he was elected a member of that same academy. He died on March 29, 2012, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Mele is consistently framed in institutional and encyclopedic sources as one of the exponents of concrete art in Latin America, credited alongside his Arte Concreto-Invencion and Grupo Arte Nuevo colleagues with advancing a rigorous geometric abstraction distinct from European precedents. His election to the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes in 2002 and the Alberto J. Trabucco Prize in 1997 reflect sustained institutional recognition within Argentina, as do solo exhibitions at the Museo de Artes Plasticas Eduardo Sivori in 1981 and the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires in 1987. No verifiable, exact critical quotation from a named critic in a major outlet was located for this profile, so none is reproduced here.

Documented auction activity for Juan Mele is limited. The highest price reported for his work is USD 134,500, for the 1948 painting Pintura No. 110, cited by Reuters in coverage of Latin American art auction results published in late 2011. The exact auction house and sale date are not specified in the sources located for this profile, though the sale is reported as having taken place in New York. No higher subsequent sale has been identified. Given the small number of public transactions, any single result should be read as an isolated data point rather than as evidence of a broad, liquid market.

There is no catalogue raisonne identified for Juan Mele, and no current gallery or estate representation was confirmed in the available research. The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes Neuquen holds more than sixty of his works by donation, which is the most concretely documented institutional holding found. Auction data is sparse, with the one well-reported result, Pintura No. 110 at USD 134,500, dating to 2011 and lacking a confirmed sale house or exact date. Collectors should treat provenance and exhibition history, rather than auction comparables, as the primary basis for evaluating any work attributed to him.