About a year ago, Ms. Caminos showed Ms. Reddick color renderings of project. “It was amazing,” Ms. Reddick said. “I said, ‘We have to do this.’ ”

But she knew it was going to be an expensive project, costing maybe as much as $1 million. “We went through three or four iterations before we landed on something that was the right price,” Ms. Reddick said.

There were lots of tricky elements. The team could not do anything that would contaminate the beach. And they worried about rain. They had to come up with a special coating to keep the cars from turning to mud. “You don’t want to commission an art work, and the day before it opens, it washes away,” Ms. Reddick said.

Mr. Erlich began painting in his teens. But he shifted to installations and found he especially liked creating illusions and disrupting perceptions. He had grown up walking around construction sites with his father, an architect. In college he studied philosophy.

He got a big break in 2001 when Ms. Caminos, who had become a deputy in Argentina’s department of cultural affairs, recommended him as the country’s representative at the 2001 Venice Biennale, one of the most prestigious global art fairs.

He had been working on a playful illusion, and he took it to Venice. It was a rectangular, above ground swimming pool. It looked full. But it had only a few inches of shimmering water at the top. People walked inside the pool through a side door. From above, they seemed to be in the water. Sometimes they pretended to be swimming.