Erminio Blotta

Blotta's family came to his adoptive country when he was only a child, at the beginning of 1894, during a major wave of Italian immigration to Argentina.

He was an apprentice worker in the Ferrocarril Central Argentino railway company, where he developed his basic sculpting skills by modelling figurines with clay.

He returned to Rosario, and with the assistance of his friends and the financial support of an amateur art fan he opened an exhibition gallery and presented his first bass-reliefs in bronze.

Blotta did not find the person he was looking for, but instead met the father of Paraguayan artist Modesto Delgado Rodas, who took him in as a guest.

In Villeta, Blotta also met Carmen de Jesús Prieto Ruiz, a young schoolteacher and a few months later, on September 4, 1918, he married her.

Blotta also worked as a draftsman in the Ports Direction of Rosario, and collaborated as a plaster artisan in the scale model of the thalweg of the Paraná River.

Additionally, he earned a living with funeral art, producing (for example) several hundreds of bronze objects for headstones, often with his colleague Pedro Cresta (1912–1970).

Works by Erminio Blotta can be found in the Argentine provinces of Santa Fe, Buenos Aires, Mendoza, Córdoba, Tucumán, Entre Ríos (specifically in Concepción del Uruguay), and Chaco (in the capital city, Resistencia), as well as in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, and in the Mefalsim kibbutz in Israel.