Alicia Penalba’s earliest years between 1913 and 1920 unfolded as a restless journey across the dramatic landscapes of South America, shaped by the rhythm of the railways and the strict discipline of an immigrant household.

Alicia Penalba’s Birth and Early Years in San Pedro, Argentina (1913–1915)

On August 9, 1913, Alicia Rosario Pérez Penalba was born in San Pedro, a town in Argentina’s Buenos Aires Province. Her parents, Santiago Pérez and Remedios Penalba, had immigrated from Spain in search of new opportunities, settling briefly in San Pedro with their growing family. For the first two years of her life, young Alicia knew the modest stability of this provincial community alongside her sisters and brother.

A Nomadic Childhood Along the South American Railways (1915–1920)

That quiet beginning ended around 1915, when her father’s work as a builder and employee for the Argentine railway network (Ferrocarriles Argentinos) set the family in constant motion. Over the next five years, Alicia’s childhood became defined by packing boxes, boarding trains, and arriving in unfamiliar towns at the edges of expanding rail lines. Rather than putting down roots in a single neighborhood, she grew up measuring time through changing horizons.

From 1915 through 1920, Santiago Pérez’s assignments carried the family across vast stretches of Argentina and neighboring Chile. In the Cuyo region of western Argentina, including San Juan Province, Alicia experienced the stark beauty of arid plains shadowed by the towering Andes. Other stretches of her childhood took her far south into Patagonia, where relentless winds swept across open steppes, rugged mountains, and distant glaciers, as well as into railway communities across the Chilean border. For a young girl with an observant eye, the natural world was never static; it shifted from sun-baked deserts to dense forests and jagged rock formations.

Family Life and the Roots of Alicia Penalba’s Independence

Inside the home, however, life was far less open. Biographers note that Santiago Pérez was a severe, authoritarian father whose rigid rules dominated daily life. Growing up under his strict control alongside her siblings, Alicia experienced a sharp contrast between the confinement of her domestic world and the untamed freedom of the landscapes just beyond her doorstep. That tension planted an early seed of fierce independence—one that would later drive her to leave home on her own at fifteen and eventually abandon her father’s surname altogether, signing her sculptures solely as "Penalba" in honor of her mother.

How South American Landscapes Shaped Penalba’s Future Abstract Sculpture

By 1920, at the age of seven, Alicia Penalba had not yet stepped into an art studio or touched a sculptor’s chisel. Yet the visual and emotional foundation of her life’s work was already firmly in place. Decades later, when she rose to international acclaim in Paris during the 1950s and 1960s, critics and curators would recognize the echoes of those railway years in her monumental bronze Totems, Plant Liturgies, and soaring winged abstractions—forms born from a childhood spent wandering the wild geology of South America.