Author Description

The exhibition sets out to chart the complex and fragmented path of geometric abstraction in Latin America so as to reveal the way in which it renovated and also differed from the constructions and inventions produced by European geometric abstraction. Painting, sculpture, photography, and architecture are represented through the nearly three hundred pieces on display, some never before viewed outside their country of origin, by a total of sixty-four artists from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Uruguay, Venezuela and Mexico. The exhibition has a specific time frame defined by the dates in which two artists returned to America from Europe: 1934, the year when Joaquín Torres-García settled permanently in Montevideo following his European (and North American) tour, and 1973, when Venezuelan artist Jesus Rafael Soto returned to his native city of Ciudad Bolivar to attend the opening of the museum that carries his name... The exhibition offers a vision of a Latin America that differs from the normal stereotype: rather than a hasty and cliched identification of the continent with the intense heat of spontaneity, or an association of the concept of the indigenous with that of the tropics and the Caribbean, the work of these artists in fact points to a 'cold' South America: objective, geometrical and rational, and one that gave rise to a fascinating and surprising type of abstract art.