Gertrudis Chale was an Austrian painter based in Buenos Aires, where she achieved integration into the local art scene and everyday life. She was very interested in the rural areas of Argentina and of Latin America in general and spent many years travelling throughout the region.
Born in 1898, Chale studied first at the School of Arts and Crafts of Vienna, her home town, and later studied painting at the Heimann school in Munich. In the mid-1920s, she went to Switzerland and then Paris, where she worked as a publicist for advertising companies. At the beginning of the 1930s, she moved from France to Spain to work as an artistic collaborator in a fashion house. She spent a year in the Balearic Islands, dividing her time between Mallorca and Ibiza. She eventually settled in Madrid for more than a year. Because of her Jewish origins, Europe was no longer a safe place and she decided to emigrate to Argentina in 1934.
In Buenos Aires, Chale settled in the suburb of Quilmes, a neighbourhood in the south of the city, and quickly integrated into the metropolis's artistic and intellectual milieu, joining a group of artists and intellectuals made up of both Europeans and Argentinians. She was part of the group that met regularly at the house of Norah Lange and her husband Oliverio Girondo, both writers. Norah Lange was a friend of Jorge Luis Borges, who in 1924 wrote a preface for her book La calle de la tarde, and with whom she founded Proa magazine in 1922. Grete Stern, Horacio Coppola and Clément Moreau also took part in these meetings. This cosmopolitan circle was very representative of Buenos Aires.
Chale travelled throughout Argentina, from the northern Andes to Patagonia in the south. She painted strong, sensitive landscapes and the people she met in the villages she stayed in. She also tried to immortalise some of the local traditions in her work. In her writing, she criticised the American phenomenon of "looking towards Europe” and shared the growing desire of her American colleagues to orientate their intellectual approach towards indigenous and local cultural forms. Also, her paintings and drawings explored the suburbs as a liminal space between the two worlds: the urban and the field. For Chale, Quilmes, where she lived, represented this ambiguous space, this in-between. She travelled in many countries in Latin America (Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, Brazil, Mexico and Uruguay). Gertrudis Chale died in 1954, in a plane crash on a return flight from Mendoza to Buenos Aires.