M65MARTIN CIBEIRA

I was born in Buenos Aires in 1965. I attended a Catholic school, where I enjoyed sports and creative subjects.

Part of my childhood took place during Argentina's military dictatorship. The military seized power in 1976, when I was ten years old. I was too young to understand the politics fully, but I was aware of the fear around me. People opposed to the government were being taken away, and many disappeared.

School was shaped by strict discipline, priests and punishment. At times, it felt a little like The Wall.

But my childhood was also shaped by a very different environment.

My father was the director of a rehabilitation hospital, and I grew up living within its grounds, around the sports facilities, basketball courts and swimming pools used by patients.

I was surrounded by people with paraplegia, amputations and other physical disabilities. Anatomy books, bones, muscles and the human body were part of my everyday world.

I was a protected child, but I grew up observing a reality that most children rarely encounter. The body was never distant or abstract to me. It was part of everyday life, something I lived alongside and became curious about.

At the age of twelve, I began studying life drawing with Pérez Macías in Buenos Aires. My interest in drawing and painting continued alongside my education and professional development.

I studied Graphic Design at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), graduating in 1989. I also studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredón in Buenos Aires for less than a year.

After graduating, I continued studying painting with the Argentine painter Héctor Medicci. Meanwhile, I worked in three graphic design studios before opening my own studio.

A turning point in my approach to graphic design came after a workshop with Scott Makela, who was associated with the design programme at Cranbrook Academy of Art in the United States. His experimental approach to visual communication helped me rethink the boundaries of graphic design and opened up new possibilities for my own practice.

From that point, my work increasingly moved towards experimental graphic design and digital image-making. Although painting remained central to my artistic development, digital processes became another space for exploration.

My background in graphic design gave me a strong foundation in composition, image-making and visual communication. Over time, painting, graphic design and digital experimentation became interconnected parts of my practice.

Today, M65 brings these different paths together through painting, collage, drawing, sculptural objects, photography and digital experimentation. Moving between physical materials and digital images, my work continues to explore distortion, transformation and the shifting boundaries between the familiar and the strange.