Xul Solar Biography | Oil Paintings

Alejandro Xul Solar was born in San Fernando, Buenos Aires Province, his real name is Oscar Agustín Alejandro Schulz Solari. He was educated in Buenos Aires, first studying music and architecture, although he never completed his architectural studies. He held a variety of minor municipal jobs and worked as a schoolteacher. In 1912, when he was twenty-five, he got a job on a freight steamer going to Hong Kong via the Suez Canal, but he disembarked in London and made his way to Turin. He later returned to London to meet up with his mother and aunt, and they went through France and Italy together. Over the following few years, despite World War I, he would still travel all over France and Italy, but towards the end of the war, he stayed in Milan, working for the Argentine consulate.

During the war years, Xul Solar became friends with Emilio Pettoruti, a fellow Argentine artist, living in Italy and associated with the Futurists. Also around that time, he started to give careful consideration to painting and adopted the pen-name of Xul Solar. His first major exhibition was in Milan in 1920, together with the Italian sculptor Arturo Martini.

Alejandro Xul Solar continued his travels, this time going to Germany. In 1924, his work was exhibited in Paris in a show of Latin American artists, after which he returned to Buenos Aires, and became associated with the literary-artistic avant-garde Florida group a.k.a. Martín Fierro group, which included Jorge Luis Borges, with whom he was to keep an association and close friendship.

Xul Solar had a strong interest in astrology, and Buddhism and believed in rebirth, and in 1939 he began to draw his astrological charts and developed his own set of Tarot cards.

He invented two fully elaborated fanciful languages, also an exponent of duodecimal mathematics, and symbols which he used in his paintings. He invented two languages, one called "Neo Criollo", a poetic fusion of Portuguese and Spanish, which he would frequently use as a spoken language in talking to people, and the other a "Pan Lingua", which aspired to be a world language linking mathematics, music, astrology and the visual arts.

Alejandro Xul Solar’s paintings during the Second World War reflected the powerful emergence of inhumanity and the potential effects on the world at large wore very heavy on the artist.

Art Movement: Expressionism, Surrealism.
He Traveled To Germany, Uruguay, England, Italy, France.
Artist Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.