The 1970s and early 1980s saw many Argentine artists leave the country, out of justifiable fear for their lives as dozens of artists disappeared during the brutal Proceso. Some preferred to stay, using indirect means of criticizing the Philistine barbarians who governed the country. In 1971 the Centro de Arte y Comunicación was founded by art critic Jorge Glusman (now director of the MNBA), and took over where the disbanded Centro de Artes Visuales and Romero Brest had left off - though Glusman was less dictatorial in his approach. Two key figures stand out during this period: Pablo Suárez (born 1937) whose La terraza (1983) at the MNBA is typical of his black humour and anti-Argentinidad credo, being a sardonically cruel pastiche of the Sunday asado; and his contemporary Víctor Grippo (born 1936), whose Analogía I (1970-71) at the MNBA comprises forty potatoes in pigeonholes with electrodes attached, seen retrospectively as a horrific premonition of the military's torture chambers. Suárez had first had to rebel against his aristocratic estanciero family, which he did as an adolescent by fashioning erotic sculptures only to destroy them at once. Much of his later work is also sexually provocative, while poking fun at sacrosanct aspects of the Argentine way of life. His grotesque Monumento a Mate (1987) hits a raw nerve of the Argentine psyche, the national drink of mate , while his oyster-shaped sculpture La Perla: retrato de un taxi-boy (1992) depicts a naked adolescent reclining in the place of a pearl - taxi-boy is the Porteño term for a rent-boy, so-called because male prostitutes in the capital demand the "taxi-fare home" rather than payment for their services. As for Grippo, his most famous work is Analogía IV (1972), again featuring potatoes, highly symbolic as they are native to South America and successfully imported into North America, Europe and the rest of the world. In this seminal work a white table-top is laid with a china plate, metal cutlery and three potatoes, while another, black in colour, is laid with identical crockery and cutlery in transparent plastic - this mirror image of "real" and "fake" apparently represents military puppet President General Alejandro Lanusse's humiliating invitation to recall Perón from his Spanish exile in 1972. Another contemporary of theirs, Antonio Seguí (born 1934), is also out on an artistic limb: his comic-like paintings, such as the untitled acrylic (1987) on show at the MNBA, depict a somewhat sinister, behatted figure in countless different poses, representing urban alienation. Younger artist Alfredo Prior (born 1952) - whose En cada sueño habita una pena (1985) at the MNBA, is one of the most horrific yet beautiful Argentine paintings produced in recent years - deliberately kept himself apart from artistic circles, rarely exhibiting his work. Minimalism and Japanese art are strong influences on his work along with Turner in his use of colour, as in Paraíso (1988). The style of Ricardo Cinalli (born 1948), who lives in London, has been described as postmodern Neoclassicism, and his Blue Box (1990) is a prime example of his original use of layers of tissue paper upon which he colours in pastel. Mónica Giron (born 1959) takes her inspiration from her native Patagonia and her environmental concerns to produce innovative works like Trousseau for a Conqueror (1993) which features a pullover specially knitted for a buff-necked ibis, putting her undeniably in the same school, despite her different style, as Marta Minujin. Guillermo Kuitca (born 1961) is without a doubt Argentina's most successful contemporary artist - his paintings sell for over $100,000 at New York auctions - and in many ways he encapsulates what Argentine art has become, the way it has turned full circle. Argentina remains a country of mostly European immigrants and their descendants who, however hard they try, cannot sever the umbilical cord that links them culturally to their parents' and grandparents' homelands. Above all, Kuitca's work is highly original and makes no attempt to create something nationally Argentine - as witnessed by his beautiful painting at the MNBA, La consagración de la primavera (1983) - but it is no coincidence that his series of maps, such as those printed onto a triptych of mattresses (1989) are almost exclusively of Germany and central Europe where his own roots are. The 1986 novel The Lost Language of Cranes , by David Leavitt, in which the son's favourite pastime is drawing maps of non-existent places, was the main inspiration for this theme, while the choreography of German creator Pina Bausch is another source of ideas for the artist. Argentine artists seem finally to have given up trying to forge the Argentinidad that Borges and his colleagues were set on inventing in the 1920s, and have acknowledged instead that, in the global village of constant interaction, personal styles and talent are more important than an attempt to create an artificial national identity through art.