(b. Lübeck, Germany, 1937, lives in New York).
Camnizer is a Uruguayan conceptual artist and teacher of German birth. Of Jewish ancestry, he fled with his family to Uruguay in 1939. He studied at the University of Uruguay between 1953-57 and also between 1959-62, before a Guggenheim fellowship took him to New York in 1961 to study printmaking. Although he eventually settled in the United States, he retained his Uruguayan citizenship. During the 1970s, Uruguay and Latin America in general inspired a series of conceptual installations that addressed such issues as language, identity, freedom, repression and the role of art. Politics is a dominant element in Camnitzer's work, expressed through ethical and artistic debate rather than through rhetoric. For Camnitzer, the task of the artist was to be aware of and express the problems that surround him, an attitude that challenged a perceived lack of meaning prevalent in much contemporary work. His questioning of traditional values applied
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