[clarification needed] Whilst Jorge Romero Brest, the influential Buenos Aires art critic of the sixties and seventies, had declared the death of painting, Prior devoted eight years of work to mastering the medium.
After his first exhibition, in the Lirolay Gallery in 1970, where he presented 28 portraits of children made with tempera and wax, Prior began working on new abstract series, in which he used sheets of crumpled tracing paper as the supports.
Armando Rearte, Osvaldo Monzo, Guillermo Kuitca and Prior took part in the exhibition of paintings produced by the artists working together.
[clarification needed] Prior took up residence in a basement at 959 Riobamba Street, a collective workshop, exhibition space and occasional cabaret, called "La Zona", where he would remain for three years.[when?]
By 1984, after his third exhibition, Prior's personal canon, his private history of arts which ruled the political decisions of his imaginary, was already perfectly defined.
[clarification needed] In 1988 he exhibited at the Beau Lézard of Paris, at the Moderna Museum of Stockholm, at the Terne Gallery of New York during a tribute to Roland Barthes, and at the newly opened Iberoamerican Cooperation Institute (ICI).
[citation needed] In 1993, Prior proposed an exhibition simultaneously composed of eight heteronyms, judged by critics to be openly making fun of all traditional conceptualist and neo-conceptualist practices.
Prior improvised Da Vinci and chose the name "The War of Styles" for his "Davincian Orchestration", rebuilding the studies of the artist's lost fresco The Battle of Anghiari.