WOMEN GEOMETERS by Quadrifolium Group

WOMEN GEOMETERS

Curated by Adriana Herrera TÃ©llez June 29th - September 14th, 2019

WOMEN GEOMETERS

Curated by Adriana Herrera Téllez Curatorial Assistance by Flávia Macuco Pecego June 29th - September 14th, 2019

Camino a Garzón, km 1 Garzón | Uruguay 5520 NE 4th Avenue Miami | USA info@pieroatchugarry.com www.pieroatchugarry.com Graphic Design Arch. Alessio Gilardi Quadrifolium Group Srl, Lecco (Italy) Copy Editing: Mariana Zapata Print G&G Srl, Padova (Italy) Photo Credits Oriol Tarridas, Leonardo Finotti (2-3, 110-111)

WOMEN GEOMETERS. Introduction

LOLÓ SOLDEVILLA

Adriana Herrera Téllez Cuba, 1901 - 1971

47 GEGO

Germany, 1912 - Venezuela, 1994

MARÍA FREIRE

REGINA APRIJASKIS

MIRA SCHENDEL

LYGIA CLARK

MERCEDES PARDO

ZILIA SÁNCHEZ

LYGIA PAPE

LÍA BERMÚDEZ

FANNY SANÍN

Uruguay, 1917 - 2015

France, 1919 – Peru, 2013

Switzerland, 1919 - Brazil, 1988 Brazil, 1920 - 1988

Venezuela, 1921 - 2005 Cuba, 1926 -

Brazil, 1927 - 2004 Venezuela, 1930 Colombia, 1938 -

105 LYDIA OKUMURA

Brazil, 1948 -

110 ABOUT Piero Atchugarry Gallery

WOMEN GEOMETERS. Introduction Adriana Herrera Téllez

The first women philosophers, who belonged to the Pythagorean School, were also mathematicians and geometers. Despite the fact that their participation was an exception in ancestral times, they contributed considerably to the development of these areas. However, the memory of the world is fickle—twenty-five centuries later, Latin American abstract artists born in various places before 1950 faced both the paradoxes of history and those of the art world: by and large they experienced a difficult and late recognition. Nevertheless, in this second decade of the 21st century, we are able to understand better than ever before how these great artists contributed to the development of geometric abstraction. They extended the field of vision and creation by challenging the rules and the very limits of the various movements of this great current that crossed the continent. Women Geometers gathers and celebrates the life and creation of a significant group of twelve Latin American pioneers. It proposes a dialogue that has not taken place before, as they had never been exhibited in the same space simultaneously. They are (in chronological order of birth): Loló Soldevilla (Cuba, 1901-1971), Gego (Germany, 1912-Venezuela, 1994), María Freire (Uruguay, 1917-2015), Regina Aprijaskis (France, 1919-Peru, 2013), Mira Schendel (Switzerland, 1919-Brazil, 1988), Lygia Clark (Brazil, 1920-1988), Mercedes Pardo (Venezuela, 1921-2005), Zilia Sánchez (Cuba, 1926), Lygia Pape (Brazil, 1927-2004), Lía Bermúdez (Venezuela, 1930), Fanny Sanín (Colombia, 1938), and Lydia Okumura (Brazil, 1948). With different visions and levels of recognition, all these pioneers extended the confines of geometric abstraction both aesthetically and in territories of intersection with other fields of knowledge, ranging from the philosophy of being to the connection with the body and erotic sensitivity. One of the challenges of Women Geometers was bringing together works within a period that spans from the fifties to the present decade, while exploring manifestations of dissimilar nature in geometric abstraction. This comprehensive exploration involves discovering the proximity between apparent opposites. The curatorial perspective does not respond to the identification of each of these artists with feminism or with Latin America as a concept, but it does validate the recognition of gender and cultural identity in the analysis and comprehension of art history narratives. On the other hand, it also honors the unique and often counter-flowing path of these pioneers who, against all odds, reasserted decade by decade their need to build a language of their own. Distance, rebellion and revelation, disobedience and rupture, and a profound affirmation of a creative autonomy, inseparable from life and self in a determined time period, can all be traced in the biography and work of these artists. Coming from geographical spaces as different as they are distant—Gego and Schendel arrived in the Americas as adults—and having been born in a period that covers almost half a century, these pioneers generated ruptures or subverted the rules established by the artistic movements in the continent. They share an ontological mode of existential bonding with geometric

abstraction. Besides, they reconnected it with life, with different modes of affirmation of a subjectivity that goes through the experience of being in the world. These pioneers created a room of their own that extended and altered the history of art in Latin America. This linkage also generates a geometry deeply contaminated by the sense of the corporeal, in a way that can even include—as in the work of Zilia Sánchez, and in some exceptional Freire paintings—the referential connection, although abstract, to the female body or the human figure. Above all, this connection involves the conscious incorporation of the being that perceives and interrogates, through the senses, the limits of reality and the search to provoke an experience of art through art. The liberation from geometric rigidity that magnified vitality rather than denying it, reaches a unique expression in the works of Zilia Sánchez that synthesizes the link between female erogenous zones and early Suprematism. We could say that she has managed to use painting to create again and again a tridimensional and archetypal Venus that somehow recollects humanity’s millenary learnings, but that at the same time contains the sum of her own affective subjectivity. In certain Freire abstract iconographies, the body also appears veiled, but no less present, almost as an allusion to the arcane, as a sign that could remit us to the representation of prehistoric art. Her entire work contains a sort of diachronic approach to the symbolic forms of humanity. In Clark as well as in Pape—who even stated her desire for “epidermization” in art—the lines of geometry extend to wrap their own bodies, that of others, and that of the culture of their own time. It is no accident that the latter and Soldevilla were also ballet creators. Several of their works have an awareness of space-time as the immense scenery of a dance of rhythmic forms. Soldevilla reaches “one of the highest personal expressions of Concretism’s ideals,” as Rafael DiazCasas states in the essay Loló Soldevilla: Constructing Her Universe1. This is also the title of the first comprehensive exhibition ever mounted in the United States devoted to her work, which was curated by him for the Sean Kelly Gallery, New York City. But she also encompassed that other way of knowledge that is playful. She joyfully constructed chromatic equivalences between formal sciences and musical compositions. Each small leaf or piece of wood with dancing lines, circles or colored signs contains its own key to the universe. Articulated in aluminum plates joined by hinges, the “bodies” of Clark’s iconic Bichos series—such as the Caranguejo, 1984—were made up, not as objects, but rather as “organic entities,” open to having the spectator reassemble them; an operation carried out as a way of keeping alive her questioning of pure geometric rationality. This capacity to suggest vitality also animates Gego’s works, such as the Escultura sin título, made with wire strands, or the small but powerful tridimensional drawings without paper—but with shadings—endowing minimal metallic lines with 1 DíazCasas, Rafael. “Loló Soldevilla: Constructing Her Universe”, at DíazCasas, Rafael and Viso, Olga. Loló Soldevilla, Klassische Moderne, Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH & Company KG, 2019, p. 32.

a cosmic potential. There is in the work of Lía Bermúdez a return to that referential linkage with nature that had been quasi-forbidden in the manifestos and practices established by geometric abstraction in the 1940s in the south of the continent. Moving away from the kinetic precepts of the predominant Venezuelan abstract movement in the 1960s and 1970s, she used iron to sculpt an “inventory” of forms inspired by nature. On one hand, she creates structures inspired on the names of natural phenomena in indigenous languages; she also makes hallucinating abstractions of “animals,” without taking away their character as metallic creatures. Lygia Clark broke away from Brazilian concrete abstraction by gradually drifting from it in order to pour her vital organicity and sense of the participative role of others into her neo-concrete work. There might be a parallel between her work and the inquiries with which Gego, distanced from the Venezuelan movement of Cinetismo (Kineticism), deconstructed the grid, animating it and reassembling it as networks that suggest the potential of growth. In the return to the organic, and even to elements of the natural world—disdained by the avant-garde and the great movements since Suprematism—far from mimesis and explicit referential forms, we are facing a series of creations done by these pioneers to provoke vivid experiences and gestures of interaction or movement. All of them created their own language that they sustained and transmitted with their art and life. In their works—in ways that range from the early interactive sculptures of Soldevilla, parallel to those of Clark, to the perception games of Okumura’s installations with threads—the proposal of interaction was a course of creation that marked an awareness of art’s relational potential. There is also a relationship with color that welcomes from subjectivity itself and in conjunction with various exercises of freedom, a tangible image of the world—one that no chromatic system can translate perfectly, as is clear in the works of Pardo and Sanín. Both artists share a subjective, personal, and untransferable relationship with color. Distanced from Mondrian’s pure primary colors, their paintings contain mixtures of their own, filled with memory. Hence, Sanín warns that she adheres to no intellectual movement or principle. “My geometry is more sensitive, and my work is color painting. But not a color that a computer could recreate, since it comes from combinations nourished by my mind and the memory of contemplating the natural beauty of the world.” She recalls how Martha Traba referred to her work as organic abstractionism. The vital experience of a given geography is also transformed into a source of pictorially released forces, as in the case of Aprijaskis. In some series of the late sixties, there is a barely perceptible connection between landscapes and geometric abstraction, mediated by perceptual apprehension. Echoes of a panorama also resonate in the segment laying out a white horizon in one of Mercedes Pardo’s powerful acrylic paintings exhibited in Women Geometers. Pardo’s work responds to a pursuit of the calm of the deep rather than to a regard that looks for the spectacular. In Aprijaskis’ transition toward the purity of intersected

geometric planes, critics notice the key influence of Barnett Newman’s radicalism that refers verticality to the position of the human body. In all cases, these geometers could not have lived without expanding, beyond recognized, legitimized or allowed limits, the spaces of abstraction that contained their way of apprehending the hermeneutics of the world, the visible and the invisible. At the same time, some inquiries, such as those of Schendel and Okumura, pose a philosophical poetic that explores, reveals, and places artistic practice itself within the knot of consciousness and perceptual illusion. They embrace the fragile and transparent in a way that reconciles the precariousness of matter with a celebration of total immersion in the experience of art in a given space-time. Emptiness, transparency, and shadow are decisive in their work, which contains an invitation for the spectator to activate contemplation through corporal movement and thought. Okumura’s drawings are conceptual, but instead of showing the voluble borders between verbal and visual representations, she created a language with materials such as wall paint and threads to interrogate the awareness of the being within reality. Through geometry, whose universality appears clear to her—everything is built out of intersections of crisscrossed fields and lines—she explores the limits between appearance and dimensions. Each drawing is a lesson for the inner eye. Multiple lines of reflection on what approximates these artists can open points of encounter and prospective gazes. Without a doubt, in the affirmation of their exercises of freedom and in the friction with moments of art history and the century in which they were born, there are crucial keys to their creations. As an indication, I point out how Schendel completed in her artistic work the philosophical inquiry that the Nazi-Fascist rise prevented her from performing when she had to abandon her studies. But her journey through various languages and countries, and her condition of exile would inspire the creation of little Babels in her works, leading her to look for ways to translate into art the existential experience of the mutable, converting that vulnerability into the source of a new language. From another place in Europe with a background as an architect and designer, Gego would go from designing furniture and houses to creating organic constructions in the form of fragile networks. In these creations, which were open to improvisation and to being off-center, and which were ultimately made of almost nothing, she welcomed the poetics of the shadow that she shared with Schendel. In fact, the fall of great—and dangerous— narratives also opens the way to a celebration of the unnoticed. In the face of the aesthetic grandiloquence of the lethal totalitarianism of the right, this type of abstract art created with fragile or precarious materials, affirms an adherence to life. On the other hand, without it being possible to extend in the frictions between the revolutions of the left and abstract aesthetic, it would be interesting to point out a paradox: Those who wanted to break the bourgeois illusion of representation and create a new, concrete art for a society that promised during Russia’s October Revolution everything to the last people on

earth, were silenced and/or placed in the fold of figurative representations2. This would be repeated at the end of the 50s in Cuba. Ernesto Menéndez Conde describes with maximum historical rigor the contradictory positions of cultural policy in the decade that followed in respect to concrete art, and demonstrates the sharp disdain of the communist sector for it3. The investigator Rafael DiazCasas admits that Soldevilla was sensitive to the atmosphere of tacit silencing in the face of abstraction. Even if she did not stop making abstract geometric work, she diminished and transformed its production. It is interesting that she then explored interdisciplinary and interactive artistic practices such as performance, before censorship began to gradually reduce experimental spaces and narrowed the boundaries of cultural policies with respect to everything that was considered “inside” or “outside” the Revolution. There is an abysmal difference between her intense abstract production in the 1950s, when she was the great champion of geometric abstraction in Cuba, and the works of the same genre created between 19614—the year of Fidel Castro’s famous “Words to Intellectuals,” and of the closing of Soldevilla’s Galería Color-Luz—and the late sixties. But if the revolutionary atmosphere of Cuba in the 60s transformed or tacitly discouraged concrete art, there was also no atmosphere of receptivity or openness to Latin American geometric abstraction in New York in the 50s. This did not change substantially for twenty years. In the midst of the Cold War, the cultural policies that emerged from the conversion of New York into the new artistic epicenter of the world concentrated on supporting American abstract expressionism. This movement emerged from the visceral force of action painting, or the lyrical and emotional value of the “color field” made primarily by assimilated European immigrants as emblematic figures of new prominence in art. Unlike—or perhaps in consequence of—the 30s, in which the United States gave attention to Mexican muralism and commissioned controversial works that exalted the struggles or figures of leftist revolutions; from the 50s, the American art world closed ranks around the isolated exaltation of its own creators, and Latin American art practically disappeared from its great institutions. The narratives of art history are constructed from the north, ignoring factors like the decisive influence that Latin American artists had in the development of abstract expressionism5. 2 Soviet cultural policy invited artists in the 20s to abandon abstraction. Stalin wished them to return to factories or get involved in the production or manufacturing of objects. The black square on Malevich’s coffin, which in recent years he used as a signature, even after having returned to figurative painting, is the most powerful symbol of resistance to that repression, comparable to Galileo’s “epur si move.” https://www.tate.org.uk/ art/artists/kazimir-malevich-1561/five-ways-look-malevichs-black-square. 3 Menéndez Conde explains how there was a multiplicity of institutional policies regarding abstraction, from the promotion of its decorative character, to its rejection and misunderstanding. The truth is that Armando Hart, Minister of Education, advocated a “massification of culture as a way to promote the ideology of the revolutionary government” (p.68). The author also mentions the negative influence of Sartre’s visit to Cuba and “the defense of a socially compromised art” (p.62). Menéndez Conde, Ernesto. Trazos en los márgenes: Arte abstracto e ideologías estéticas en Cuba (Tomo I), Paperback, New York, 2019. 4 Cabrera Infante refers to the “two problems” that in that year offered the connection of Raúl Martínez as a designer of Lunes de Revolución: he was a homosexual and an abstract artist. “Then, in 1961, the second was more serious than the first.” Ibid. 5 For example, the decisive and undeniable influence of Roberto Matta on Arshile Gorky and Kooning, which is not usually mentioned. Or the revelation that for Pollock constituted his encounter with David Siqueiros. And, of course, the importance of Joseph and Anni Albers’ trips to

SOSTITURE? 26

Creators from south of the continent endured silence about their geometric work from the 50s until almost the end of the 20th century—as in the case of the now-iconic Cuban artist, Carmen Herrera. This silence was associated with the erroneous perception that the Caribbean or southern origin of artists made their work in this field derivative art, imitative or minor. For the reaffirmation of American predominance in the cultural field, it was important to accentuate the movements that arose in the country by artists presented as Americans, and whom, because of the nature of their work, did not seem to offer that threat to the status quo that McCarthyism6 feared. The cultural production of the following decades had no interest in recognizing Latin American geometric abstraction. Abstract and/or conceptual practices of Latino artists residing in the United States were ignored or, in many cases, strictly “confined” to Latin American galleries or spaces, thus being marginalized7. There are radical differences between movements such as the Color Field and Latin American geometric abstraction. But previous or parallel explorations can be found in numerous cases, such as in the works by Lygia Pape that preceded and/or were made parallel to those of artists like Morris Louis and Frank Stella. It is not the intention of this curatorship to conduct a comparative study, but to point out, as an introduction to its approach, the context that surrounded the late recognition of these creators. Fanny Sanín evokes the unease with which at the beginning of the 70s, an era in which artists still presented their portfolios to galleries, she perceived absolute disinterest for a Latin American artist dedicated to geometric abstraction. “We are bored of the bands,” they told her. Especially if they were created by artists who came from a south always imagined as late and definitely unknown. The hegemonic canon seemed to eliminate all validity of other explorations two decades after Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland returned to Washington to paint, having already been astonished by the discoveries that they saw in Helen Frankenthaler’s study. The consideration that no one would want to buy abstract works created by a Latin American was, according to Okumura, even worse in a case like hers, being a Brazilian artist of Japanese origin in New York. The philosophical conceptualism of her works does not possibly match the expectations of what could be expected of Brazilian art. In addition to their immigrant status, these geometers faced a society that did not incorporate women artists in equitable conditions. If the great American abstract expressionists experienced exclusion, it Mexico and their discoveryof Pre-Hispanic abstraction. Ellsworth Kelly saw the work of Alejandro Otero—Mercedes Pardo’s husband and deep admirer of her work—in addition to that of Jesús Soto and other artists in the 50s in one exhibition at the Galerie Suzanne Michel in Paris, where they exhibited with Jack Youngerman. During the same period, Kelly himself exhibited at the Exposición Internacional de Arte in Caracas. 6 Art historian Julia Tatiana Bailey points out how CIA documents of the decade explained that American art could be used to spread the nation’s ideals around the world. “Abstract Expressionism, seemingly untouchable by outside influence, so indecipherable as to be ineffective as propaganda and therefore credible as the ‘free’ art of a nation that held the rights of the individual above all else.” https://blogsofwar.com/julia-tatianabailey-art-as-espionage-in-cold-war-america/ 7 The field that was left to the south of the continent was occupied by artists such as the one created with fine intelligence by Liliana Porter, Luis Camnitzer and José Guillermo del Castillo: Juan Trepadori. A fictional creator who skillfully inserted into the market to take advantage of stereotypes of motifs and aesthetics associated with expectations that did not know the potential of abstraction and conceptualism in the continent.

is unnecessary to explain the scope of interest that Latin American immigrants could hope to raise in the most influential institutions. Even in the case of Latin American artists who particularly achieved remarkable recognition after their death, such as Schendel, Clark, Gego or Pape, their true visibility in the United States is recent and/or has not been completed. In 2001, Gabriel Pérez Barreiro wrote: “If Freire had developed her work in Switzerland, France, or Germany, surely today it would be known, studied and valued. Instead, it is forgotten, isolated and marginalized in a small Montevidean workshop, full of some wonderful examples of twentieth-century art.”8 Fortunately, in the first two decades of the 20th century, numerous factors have allowed gradual recognition of artists such as these twelve artists who altered the dimensions, possibilities, and implications of geometric abstraction with the pulse of their own lives. Each of the pioneers gathered in Women Geometers challenged the limits of abstraction in Latin America, extending its field of vision and creation throughout the continent. Adriana Herrera Téllez, PhD

LOLÓ SOLDEVILLA Untitled, 1954 Collage on cardboard 7,5 x 10 in (19 x 25 cm) Private Collection

8 Pérez Barreiro, Gabriel. María Freire. Cosac & Naify Ediçoes, São Paulo, 2001, p.10.

LOLÓ SOLDEVILLA

Cuba, 1901 - 1971

LOLÓ SOLDEVILLA Autorretrato (Self-portrait), 1952 Oil on cardboard 20 x 16 in (51 x 40,5 cm) Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery, NY Photo by Gory (Original in color)

Loló Soldevilla’s trajectory was belated but dazzling: In 1949, as a cultural attaché in Paris—after a lifetime as a musician, ballet author and sagacious politician—she began to study art, encouraged by her friend Wifredo Lam. She entered the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, co-founded by Martha Steller, who disobeyed the canon of the École des Beaux-Arts. This foreign student of unique temperament inscribed her name in art history the following decade: after three exhibitions in Havana including mobile elements, she returned to Paris. There, she made acquaintances with French avant-garde groups and Los Disidentes, and studied at Dewasne and Pillet’s studio. Already in 1953, when she inaugurated Loló/Valera at the noted Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre, she astonished artists like Jean Arp1, who returned to see her unmistakable, white tableaux reliefs. As researcher Rafael DiazCasas recalls, amid the tableaux was her immense panel Homage to Sophie Taeuber-Arp, next to a playful proposal of transforming metallic mobiles. There were also innovative, interactive metallic sound sculptures. La catedral Carrillón was a piece with cymbals that clashed with one another, producing harmonious sounds. A golden metallic circle sustained this resonant cosmos. In 1954, she had a joint show in Valencia, Spain, with Eusebio Sempere, one of the great forerunners of the exceptional Spanish Geometric abstraction. They co-wrote, for their contribution at the 1955 Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, a dual Manifeste that advocated for the incorporation of light into art. They proposed the creation of new abstract designs that would allow light to attain its “own force” and be incorporated as an integral part of artworks with and through color: “From COLOR LIGHT… great results can be derived.”2 Her Reliefs Lumineux with electric light are experimental, playful and interactive. To her works of this decade, like her Cartas Celestes, she incorporated the representation of forms evoking cosmology, arithmetic proportions and musical compositions, thus creating a language for the zeitgeist.3 Once she left the Parisian art scene, she organized at Havana’s Palacio de Bellas Artes the influential exhibition Vanguardia de la Escuela de París. In 1957, she presented an individual show at the same museum and at Caracas’ Centro Profesional del Este. She also co-founded with Pedro de Oraá the historic Galería de Arte Color Luz, the epicenter of the Diez Pintores Concretos group, of which this creator of astonishing stellar landscapes was the only woman. The gradual coldness that covered Russian constructivism after the October Revolution repeated itself in the contradictory atmosphere surrounding abstraction after the Cuban Revolution, and she closed the gallery in 1961. Soldevilla dedicated herself to other required tasks: she taught art, designed toys for an official institution and cooperated with Gramma journal. After this, her unstoppable drive of abstract creation slowed down, even if she experimented with adding newspapers to her collages. She formed the Grupo Espacio in 1964, transferring the quest for a total artwork to an environment where artists, poets, architects, transvestites and dancers converged, creating happenings4 in those nights at the Ciudad de las Columnas that would fade out. Soldevilla left us a playful art of inexhaustible might. 1 DíazCasas, Rafael & Viso, Olga. Loló Soldevilla, Constructing Her Universe, Klassische Moderne, Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH & Company KG, 2019, p. 32. 2 Ibid., p.34. 3 If Dadaists and Surrealists had pursued the fourth dimension, this generation searched for the total artwork by seeking to integrate multiple arts and sciences, as the magister ludi does in Hermann Hesse’s Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game). 4 Rafael DíazCasas, Personal Interview. August 25, 2019.

LOLÓ SOLDEVILLA Untitled, 1957 Relief on wood 19 3/4 x 29 1/2 in (50 x 75 cm) Private Collection

By the mid-fifties, Loló made her first reliefs on wood, including the magnificent homage to her antecessor Sophie Taeuber-Arp. She shared a passion for ballet with this multi-faceted artist who closed gaps between high art and applied art by approaching design to the idea of transforming the perception of the world. She also coincided with this artist and her husband, Jean, in Paris. Unlike Taeuber-Arp’s reliefs, in Soldevilla’s work there are neither ruptures with the framework, nor voids, incisions or cuts. Although some groupings like the square formed by four circular “notations” in this 1957 Untitled piece remit to her predecessor’s work, there are numerous differences: Soldevilla’s circles appearing on the plane are much less prominent than the cylinders used by Taeuber-Arp, which culminate in circular, colored surfaces. Besides, in some of Loló Soldevilla’s reliefs—such as this magnificent piece—the handling of geometry resembles atonal music in that it breaks the expected sequences by means of different resources: in the first two “columns” of circles she randomly introduces either a smaller one, eliminates another, or inserts dissimilar elements. Such is the case of the formation of circles that construct two square figures that are closed down—and altered at the same time—with the insertion of an element alien to the whole set: a relief with a triangle that divides the plane. Playfulness and randomness or discontinuity—a triangle or two circumferences in a universe of circles—enrich this monochromatic universe in which white is an ersatz of light that shelters the projection of shadows better than any other color.

Each of these works in tempera or mixed media on cardboard belongs to 1956. This is the year Loló Soldevilla returned to Cuba and inaugurated the Vanguardia de la Escuela de París exhibition, which displayed the works of nearly 46 abstract artists, many of them linked to movements she had discovered on her trips to Europe, like Cercle et Carré or Abstraction-Création. Unlike Brazil, where the Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibal Manifesto) had long before opened the way to freedom for foreign appropriations and assimilations, with an insubordinate zest, almost as a gesture of counter-conquest; in Cuba, a sector headed by Communists mistrusted the European influence, undeniable in Soldevilla’s work. But this was far from meaning subordination. The materials reflect two of her explorations developed in parallel at the time: concrete art and informalism. Tempera and either paper or cardboard are favorable to the irregularities of a color’s surface, which contains the very life of the manual and the imperfect, in such a way that it moves away from the purity of plasticism and other currents within Concretism. Blue and black backgrounds contain this allusion to vast cosmic spaces that are key to the Cartas celestes series, initiated that same year. It is true that working with space the way Concretists did refers in a way only to the pictorial plane on which one works. But upon concentrating on creation and the problems of dimensionalities, the limitless space, the cosmos itself, appears. This was perfectly noticeable in the treatment of spatial masses on the sculptures of Georges Vantorgerloo, co-founder of the Abstraction-Création group. Soldevilla’s geometries with colored circles and squares on paper during this transitional period between two worlds, full of enthusiasm for abstraction, gather together a perception that is close to the music of the spheres. There is a freedom of creation marked by her capacity of perceiving synesthesia: she anticipated the silent harmony of the dancing colored squares and circles of some sidereal space.

LOLÓ SOLDEVILLA Untitled, 1956 Mixed media on cardboard 9 x 6 1/4 in (23 x 16 cm)

LOLÓ SOLDEVILLA Untitled, 1956 Mixed media on cardboard 7 1/2 x 10 in (19 x 25.5 cm)

Dario Samada Collection

LOLÓ SOLDEVILLA Untitled, 1956 Tempera on cardboard 12 x 16 in (30.5 x 40.5 cm)

GEGO

Germany, 1912 - Venezuela, 1994

Courtesy of Fundación Gego Photo by Ricardo Goldman, 1978

Gego studied architecture and engineering at the current University of Stuttgart, Germany, in 1938, the same year of the fateful Night of Broken Glass. She migrated to Venezuela in 1939, acquiring citizenship in 1952, and coinciding with the oil boom and the modernist project of the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas. After a three-year sojourn in the town of Tarma, where she started to experiment with tri-dimensional objects and lived with fellow artist Gerd Leufert—her companion since 1953—she returned to Caracas in 1956. The following year, she initiated her personal process with abstraction, working both introspectively and independently “on the fringes of kinetic or geometric abstraction,”1 as Rina Carvajal wrote. Carvajal’s essays highlight Gego’s dialog with the local context and the incorporation of humble materials reflecting the instability and contradictions of the modernist Utopia. Between 1959 and 1967 Gego deepened her graphic skills. She studied and/or worked in several places: the Iowa State University workshops; the Treitel-Gratz Co. atelier in New York, where she made engravings and sculptures; and the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles. She also earned a scholarship from the Pratt Institute. In her relationship with space, deeply marked by her architectural vision, linkage and transparency are constructive elements of the structure that originates from the lineal matrix. The line generates2 works in multiple media—the Líneas paralelas series, for example, began in 1957 and carried on for decades. This influence can also be seen in the tri-dimensional tissue of her Gran reticulárea, 1969, whose metallic “lines” are interwoven like a living organism with the potential to expand itself infinitely. In fact, between 1969 and the 1980s she modified this piece at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas. This is a work without epicenters, articulated so that spectators experience space from their own being with a universe of forms evocative of organic networks: “In Gego’s work, the form creates and recreates itself at its very limits through a permanent process of flux and dislocation.”3 Certaintly, “the idea of the work is that of an active field in its passage toward planes of subjectivity.”4 In the posterior Chorros series, she created a system of tri-dimensional metallic lines falling down from a point in a way that does not control the artwork’s form, inserting fragments of shifting knots into it as well. In these as much as in her Esferas, the essential fact is that, as pointed out by Luis Pérez Oramas, “…by cancelling the notion of a symmetrical, centered structure, she achieved a radically organic form of abstraction.”5 Gego created works integrated in to architectural spaces such as Cuerdas, 1972, an aerial, environmental sculpture in Caracas’ Parque Central, with a warp of hanging nylon “lines” and metallic strips interwoven with the open space. She fulfilled her dream of hanging Reticuláreas among skyscrapers and above the streets of the urban center.6

1 Carvajal, Rina. “Gego: Outside In, Inside Out,” at The Experimental Exercise of Freedom: Lygia Clark, Gego, Mathías Goeritz, Hélio Oiticica, and Mira Schendel (Exhibition Catalog), organized by Rina Carvajal and Alma Ruiz and presented at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1999-2000, p. 114. 2 Hanni Ossot also includes in the structural system of the line the verticals of Chorros (1979-1971), the triangle of Reticuláreas, Esferas y Troncos (1968-1976), and the square (1971-1976), present in Columna, 1970, Reticulárea cuadrada, 1972, and her initial Dibujos sin papel. Gego 1957-1988: Thinking the Line, edited by Nadja Rottner & Peter Weibel. Hatje Cantz Verlaj, Germany, 2006. Pp. 206-209. 3 Ibid., p. 114. 4 Ibid., p. 46. 5 Oramas, Luis Pérez. “Gego’s Stream No. 7”. Post at MoMA. June 6, 2017, https://post.at.moma.org/content_items/970-gego-s-stream-no-7 6 Letter from Gego to Siso Shaw y Asociados, Caracas, Venezuela, June 10, 1972. Fundación Gego Archives, Caracas, Venezuela.

GEGO S/T., 1966 Steelwire 6 1/4 x 25 3/4 x 6 3/4 in (16 x 65,5 x 17 cm) Brillembourg Capriles Collection

The small sculpture of knotted steel wire, one of the most beautiful of its kind, contains the full strength of the organic, a playful openness to creation, and, undoubtedly, a disrespect to the tenets of cinetismo and geometric abstraction. Gego made this untitled work when she was studying and working at the Tamarind Lithograph Workshop, where she also created her wonderful Book of Lithographs, in which the line is visually confused with a thread, and graphic work with the weave. The wire threads of this tri-dimensional piece are also related to the Pequeñas estructuras that she started in the mid-sixties with horizontal lines of iron on a pedestal. But the lightness of steel adds a new flexibility to the articulations, making up an organic figure. The piece is organic to such extent that its shape may even evoke an insect or some of those hybrid creatures remitting to the vast realm of human fantasy. Thus, the piece anticipates the freedom of one of the series of small tri-dimensional works that Gego made in her final years with residual materials of her pieces or found elements: her Bichitos (1987-1989). One of the most important traits of this Untitled work is the sensibility it conveys— because of the way the body “filaments” are articulated, remaining loose at each side, it reacts with subtle vibratory movements to any air stream or random motion in its surroundings. That oscillation between its static posture sustained on “legs” and the movement transferred by the environment convey a unique liveliness to the piece. The warp of the universe is made in such a way that no form is entirely autonomous. In the micro as well as the macro realms, everything is interwoven and interdependent. This comprehension is also perceivable in the small weavings that Gego later made, between 1988 and 1991, with wires, meshes and materials as delicate as paper.

GEGO Dibujo sin papel #4, 1983 Acrylic sheet, iron springs, upholstery threads, steel wire, and metal combs. 7 3/4 x 7 3/4 x 3 1/4 in (20 x 20 x 8 cm) Private Collection

When referring to Gego, “the most important Venezuelan female artist of the 20th century,” and her distancing from cinetismo, Luis Pérez-Oramas specifies: “Whereas Soto and others cancelled shadows in their works, Gego unfolded her oeuvre through dense clouds and entangled structures that cast their presence as shadows in the exhibition space.”1 Shadows irradiate energy and potentiate the dialog with the void of her mid-sized installations of the 1970s, like her organic Esferas no.2 and Esferas no.4, 1976. However, in the iconic Dibujo sin papel series, initiated in the same period, the shadow is, sensu stricto, drawing. The small tri-dimensional structures constituted by subtle sets of steel thread are the media in which Gego puts down the potential creation of these drawings that exist only in the game of their projection on the wall through the action of light. In the case of Dibujo sin Papel #4, 1983, there are acrylic sheets forming the “cube”—open and no longer white, but transparent—where she installs this piece with tensed upholstery threads, iron springs and steel wire. The projection of the shadow is not only done backwards, but also extends the paperless drawing as if the transparent construction, delicately woven in metal, would rise above water. No wonder Adolfo Wilson considers this series “her most personal and intimate work (for its format as well as its crafty realization).” Refined and philosophical, the Dibujos sin Papel remind us of the lesson of the Allegory of the Cave—since everything we see in this world is but a reflection—and contain the powerful capacity to oscillate between the material and the immaterial. 1 Oramas, Luis Pérez. Ibid.

MARÍA FREIRE Uruguay, 1917 - 2015

Portrait of Maria Freire Galería de las Misiones, Montevideo Archives

The strength and confidence conveyed by María Freire’s bronze women, sculpted in 1948, reflect the essential traits of her character, and anticipate the value that her trajectory would acquire when pionering geometric abstraction in her country. Since the 50’s, Freire potentiated the development of abstraction in Uruguay. She had frictions with the followers of the great constructivist Joaquín Torres García. In a way, Freire and her husband, José Pedro Costigliolo, constituted the strongest “heresy”1 of his Escuela del Sur when they founded the Grupo de Arte No Figurativo in 1952. But paradoxically, she came closer than most to the original dream of the man who was searching for a language capable of synthetizing the universal and the local, ancestral sources and modernizing currents. The only difference is that she did it from the rigor of an abstraction with no other references than the geometric shapes resounding in the collective unconscious. The quest for a universal iconography dates back to her initial interest in African masks, but multiple influences like Suprematism, Neoplasticism, Madí or Brazilian Concretism led her to distance herself from figuration. As early as 1951, she showed in Montevideo abstract sculptures in iron with irregular geometric forms and in chrome iron with precise intersections between circles and other perfect Platonic forms. In 1954, she sculpted works in bronze with a single golden metallic line that curves, creating its own universe. In 1953 and 1957 she was invited to the São Paulo Biennial. She had already exhibited her oeuvre in 1956 in the city’s Museu de Arte Moderna and in Rio de Janeiro. Freire lived in Europe between 1957 and 1960, meeting Georges Vantorgerloo, Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo, but she knew how to release her own creative forces and also nourished herself from unexpected sources. She exhibited in Belgium her series of powerful black, flat forms in gouache or acrylic inspired in medieval European keys and locks. When the public believed these were iconographies from “South America,” she adopted the denomination, assuming “the possibilities of working with symbols that cross cultural borders.”2 In the acrylic N.4, where a single, off-centered red figure breaks the strict, minimalist repetition of identical black forms, her experimental freedom within the formal restrictions of each period becomes evident. Between 1965 and 1967—after participating in the Venice Biennial—she created her iconic Capricornio series. Later in Argentina, she started the Córdoba series with its alphabet of unique forms. Her Variantes y vibrantes series with chromatic strips occupied a whole decade until 1985. In the nineties, the archetypal images reemerged in two series that synthetize her own trajectory as well as visions of ancient cultures. In the paintings and sculptures with variations of blues and ochers, and strong reds and violets released from her América del Sur, a meeting occurs between formal sophistication and a totemic echo. In El Oro de los tigres, 1995-1996, on color strips of precise compositional wisdom, the thick, monolithic black strokes of an immemorial alphabet reappear. The lines in Borges’ prologue and poem—which give title to the book published in 1972—and in her series act perhaps as a mirror. In the former, Borges warns: “From a man who has turned seventy,”—Freire, who would have her retrospective at Montevideo’s Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in 1998, is even older by then—“there is little we can expect, save the familiar handling of some dexterities, one slight variation or another, and plenty of repetitions (…).” But the poem, like her own series, finishes with surprising revelations: “And now there is nothing left/ but the vague light, the inextricable shadow and the gold of the beginning.”3 She left us nothing less. 1 Pérez Barreiro, Gabriel. María Freire. Cosac & Naify Ediçoes, São Paulo, 2001, p.11. 2 Ibid., p. 17, and Harwood, Joanne. http://www.escala.org.uk/collection/artists/maria-freire/AUTH177/america-del-sur/O117, 2008. 3 Borges, Jorge Luis. El oro de los tigres, Emecé Editores, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1972.

MARÍA FREIRE Construcción, 1953 Painted iron 39 1/4 in (100 cm) of diameter

This sculpture, made the same year that Freire and Costigliolo participated in the São Paulo Biennial, reflects her obvious capacity to build by working the void in its interior, while at the same time irradiating the drive and vibration of the slight form into space. It allows us to understand why she is one of the great sculptresses in the continent, although her production was not quantitatively large. In fact, if she started in the early 21st century to produce large-scale sculptures in Uruguay, it is because even in her mid-20th century paintings, plainly entitled Composición or Pintura Concreta, there is a patent volumetric strength. In fact, Gabriel Pérez Barreiro notices that a great part of her bi-dimensional work “could be transferred to tri-dimensionality.”1 At the time, her sculpture had the lightness and objective sureness of a single, uninterrupted “stroke” that never doubts itself, as can be seen precisely in Construcción, 1953. The dynamism of the diagonals crossing space is sharpened by the perfect conjugation of acute and right angles and the appearance of lightness with the agility of the iron structure bursting into space, irradiating its form in multiple dimensions. This work fully possesses the liberating force of lightning: María Freire locks within iron the trajectory of a vertiginous physical phenomenon and manages to bestow on still matter the vibrational drive with which it alters the environment around it. 1 Ibid., p.12

MARÍA FREIRE Capricornio 268, 1966 Acrylic on canvas 57 1/2 x 42 1/2 in (146 x 108 cm)

This series created by María Freire between 1964 and 1968 synthetizes her quests and results from “the road toward the reencounter with the serial sign outside the geometric matrices that characterize her work until 1961.”1 Quite unintentionally, she approaches in Capricornio 268 the foundational dream of Constructivism in the south; an iconography capable of recovering the forms of a very ancient memory while remaining a modern language. We must not forget that Torres García himself said: “(…) what counts is what the artist expresses through the abstract of the form of what he figures.”2 Freire achieves the task with the power of an abstraction that has given up any recognizable reference, for it is an invention and remits to the mystery of a non-decrypted “alphabet,” a sort of ideogram of invented forms resounding in the common memory. In the notes of her personal archive she explains the origin of the series: “Capricorn is the tenth zodiacal sign. Its double nature (…) alludes to the double tendency of life toward the abyss (water) and heights (mountains). Likewise, these directions mean in Hindu doctrine the possibilities of involution and evolution, the return and the exit(…),”3 and for that reason, the series faces constant transformations. Every one of the white abstract matrices on a black background that Freire sequentially displays in columns and horizontal rows also works independently as a powerful sign in itself. The black around them is the same color that pushes out inside forming cavities, surrounding or creating open, concentric arcs and oval figures that seem to look directly at us, forcing the eye to dive deeply into its decrypted mystery. Perception can also alternatively discover the revelation of white, not as form but as negative space. As Pérez Barreiro points out, “The composition of Capricornio is made of a series of small vortexes which battle among themselves to pull the eye in.4” With this series she participated in the 33rd Venice Biennial. 1 Peluffo Linari, Gabriel. María Freire: Vida y deriva de las formas. Ministerio de Educación y Cultura: Intendencia de Montevideo. Museo Juan Manuel Blanes, Montevideo, Uruguay, 2017, p. 81. 2 Fló, Juán. Joaquín Torres García. Escritos. Arca, Montevideo, 1974. 3 Peluffo Linari, Gabriel. Op.cit., p.82. 4 Pérez Barreiro, Op.cit., 34.

MARÍA FREIRE Córdoba 415, 1969 Acrylic on canvas 45 3/4 x 42 1/2 in (116 x 108 cm)

MARÍA FREIRE Variante No. 115, 1973 Acrylic on canvas 48 3/4 x 37 1/2 in (124 x 95 cm)

In Córdoba 415, made during a period of convalescence in this Argentinian city, Freire uses discontinuous stripes with variations of blue in the clipped figures, with curved contours on a vast black background. Responding to the “constructive code” and her perennial task of “returning to art the dignity of form,”1 the composition displays three large monolithic figures of different dimensions, separated from each other by golden fringes that completely cross the plane vertically and order it. Though each one incorporates a series of forms that may seem independent, they are united by segments that act as communicating vessels and that configure a totality full of variants, kept together by other golden verticals that never burst in the black background. Gabriel Peluffo Linari sees a connection between this constant linking of curved forms with the “threading” in the large paintings of the Italian Giuseppe Capogrossi (1900-1972). There are indeed works by Freire closely entailed with the oeuvre of this artist who signed the Manifesto of Plastic Primordialism. This “certain typological archaism”2 is also present in Variante N. 115, where the form-background integration is constant and key to the marvelous one-to-one bonding of the figures in the series. Amid the iconography, there appears a form that is reminiscent of the anthropomorphic—figuring a head with arms raised or stretched—,which is in the interior of the blue fringes but is also surrounded by the black that coalesces the composition. Although it is only a “vague anthropomorphic gestuality,” its presence is patent and perhaps connected to the relationship—also seen by Peluffo Linari— with the reappearance of the human figure defended by the members of the Nueva Figuración Argentina in the middle of the previous decade. 1 PeluffoLinari, Gabriel, op.cit,, p.86. 2 Ibid.

MARÍA FREIRE Untitled, 1978 Acrylic on canvas 35 1/2 x 45 1/4 in (90 x 115 cm)

MARÍA FREIRE Con Capricornio, 1964 Acrylic on wood 37 3/4 x 23 1/2 in (96 x 60 cm)

MARÍA FREIRE Untitled, 1974 Acrylic on wood 15 1/4 x 10 1/4 in (39 x 26 cm)

MARÍA FREIRE Córdoba 220, 1970 Acrylic on canvas 18 x 13 in (46 x 33 cm)

MARÍA FREIRE Untitled, 1965 Acrylic on paper 18 1/4 x 8 3/4 in (46.5 x 22.5 cm)

MARÍA FREIRE Untitled, 1968 Acrylic on paper 14 1/4 x 8 3/4 in (36 x 22 cm)

MARÍA FREIRE Untitled, 1968 Acrylic on paper 15 3/4 x 10 3/4 in (40 x 27 cm)

REGINA APRIJASKIS France, 1919 – Peru, 2013

Courtesy of Alejandra Bedoya

Regina Aprijaskis, Peru’s most renowned abstract geometrician, lived in Lima since she was five years old. Though she studied in Europe for a brief period in her teens—from 1931 to 1933—she initially studied in Lima’s Escuela Nacional Superior Autónoma de Bellas Artes under the tutelage of Indigenista masters: Sabogal, Camilo Blas and Julia Codesido. Later, between 1963 and 1970, during her sojourn in New York’s Art Student League, and in the two years spent in parallel at the abstract expressionist Theodoros Stamos’ atelier, she finally defined her own language. Her early abstractions duly inquired on the repetition effect and the seriality of thick brushstrokes of color, vertically or horizontally aligned. From 1967, her work began to reveal a relationship between the telluric and color perception in space. In this crucial year, she painted acrylics on cotton paper indistinctly entitled Espacio, following sequential numerations (I to VII, for instance). The effect of a locus, related as much to painting as to the physical dimension of the place where we exist, is still present in the acrylics on canvas of larger dimensions, also untitled. The relationship with topography becomes explicit in the series of the same year, which marks the continuity of her quest: Paracas, originated from a brief stay in the region, a former important pre-Inca center. Aprijaskis then created extraordinary sketches fused in the vastness of the desert and the infinite horizon of water in locations representing the abstraction of memory. She also incorporated the discovery she made in the 1950s of Rothko and, above all, Barnett Newman. The Quechua voice “paracas”—sand rain; from para, rain, and aco, sand—is visually perceivable in several works of this series. Even though the telluric originated Paracas and also the posterior Costa Verde series, a full transition was produced towards pure geometry. In 1968, she painted the Espacio VIII acrylic in white, gray and black, a magnificent example of depurated abstraction sharing its origin with Paracas, shown at the Instituto de Arte Contemporáneo. In 1969, geometric works privileged color planes wherein the diagonals burst with a compositional strength that oozes vitality. During the 27-year-long period in which Aprijaskis was in charge of the family’s textile factory, her career was interrupted. She reinvented herself in 1995 when she returned with a show at the Sala Miró Quesada in Miraflores. The ancestral and the contemporary are again present in works entitled according to the color order: her parallelepipeds might evoke monoliths or sacred architectures, but they are merely, as one of her titles states, “color figures.” Two years later, at the same space, and in 1998 at the Museo de Arte de la Universidad Nacional de San Marcos, she presented her famous “subtle variations on the subject of verticals splitting the field in the manner of flags,” as described by critic Alfonso Castrillón. They are stripes containing a “sense of obstinate affirmation of life, a sequence of insistent rhythms,” wherein the “confrontation of colors, almost always primary ones, juxtaposed on black”1 are highlighted. Some paintings can be hung in two different ways, since proportions are not destroyed by inverting directions. Space itself is actually deprived of north or south, but everything keeps geometry in depth. Regina Aprijaskis was able to enclose the power of the terrestrial and the vital within the rigor of the most radical abstraction. 1 Castrillón Vizcarra, Alfonso. Regina Aprijaskis. 60 años de pintura. Galería Germán Kruger Espantoso- Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano, Lima, Peru. January-February 2004. (Introductory catalog text).

REGINA APRIJASKIS Rojo, negro, amarillo, 1996 Acrylic on canvas 47 1/4 x 79 3/4 in (120 x 200 cm) Jorge M. Pérez Collection, Miami

Jorge Villacorta Chávez identified Aprijaskis’ last creative stage, encompassing a period of eleven years between 1995 and 2006, as “a neo-constructivist horizon in contemporary visual arts in Peru.”1 In the same essay he pinpointed Barnett Newman’s key influence on her work, and particularly “the relationship between the vertical line (or fringe) which for him was the most primitive line: that of the standing body (Bárbara Reise, 1990).”2 But beyond the reference to that human-defining posture, something that cuts across and unifies Aprijaskis’ different series is the capacity to transfer a vitality-charged dynamism to the surfaces where color fields of the most rigorous abstraction can be found. In Rojo, negro, amarillo, 1996, a single red horizontal segment breaks through the vertical sequences, conveying a tension that increases the painting’s own power. Aprijaskis’ hand, which created abstractions inspired in the telluric struggle of the elements in the late 60s, invents a powerful creative strategy repeated with multiple, but never monotonous, variances. This geometrician achieves an incomparable strength by handling the minimalist resource of inserting contrasting color stripes—though also including the purest white—that burst through the succession of vertical fringes. Doing this allowed her to create not only the perceptive illusion of emptiness, rupture, or partition, but also the visual force of a geometric color field penetrating another and energizing it. 1 Villacorta Chaves, Jorge. Regina Aprijaskis. Exhibition Catalog. Sala Luis Miró Quesada Garland, Centro Cultural de la Municipalidad de Miraflores, Lima, Peru, 1997, p.2. 2 Ibid, p.4.

REGINA APRIJASKIS Blanco, azul, negro, amarillo, 2001 Acrylic on canvas 47 1/4 x 33 1/2 in (120 x 95 cm) Aprijaskis Foundation

In 1998, Aprijaskis painted the acrylic Tríptico blanco y negro. The alternation of fringes can be linked to her own musical scale. There is undoubtedly an ordered succession of color fields varying their widths within the painting. The pace is set by the number of stripes, twelve in this case, as in chromatic music. In 2001, this series started with titles varying according to stripe’s order of succession, alternating the total absence and the maximum concentration of color, and two primary tones. In this work, the top-bottom order is white, blue, black, and yellow, while the lower black third remains invariable, as in other paintings of the series: a constant signaling of a “partition” associated to the golden ratio1. She often relies on the thin “scale” of the blue fringe with the supreme intensity of vibration, while the white creates the perceptual illusion of the void or the separation of segments without losing the cohesion of the series that grows stronger from one variant to the next. Another highly appealing optical aspect in this and other works in the series is the tension between the horizontal stripes and the vertical format of the canvas. Up until 2003, Aprijaskis made unceasing variations between the same four primary colors of this series, containing some Pythagorean mystique, the radical lessons of the American color field and a synthesis of the infinite with minimal materials. 1 Castrillón Vizcarra, Alfonso. Op. cit.

MIRA SCHENDEL

Switzerland, 1919 - Brazil, 1988

Portrait of Mira Schendel, 1966 © Clay Perry, England & Co.

Mira Schendel’s work incarnates the idea of a transversal ars poetica nurtured by “a constellation of sources: concrete poetry, phenomenology, the epic tradition, Zen Buddhism and aspects of eastern and western philosophy.”1 She listened with deep concentration to Hermann Schmitz’ arguments on a new phenomenology centered in corporeity, and she discussed theology with the Dominicans. She used the signs of alphabets and numerical systems to cypher and decipher life. The works she created, capable of cutting across the quotidian, were not an end in themselves. “I never purported a sculpture as a sculpture, nor an object as an object (…) Searching for transparency as a problem I reached the object,” she explained.2 Her inquiries on subjects like being and time, “the field of transparency”3 originated her artistic series. These series are a set of works that, by searching beyond themselves, transformed the language of modernity. She arrived in Brazil at the age of 30, in 1949, leaving behind the European postwar. In the southern part of a continent on the other side of the world, she embraced artistic endeavors through which she expanded the philosophical inquiries that she had interrupted eleven years earlier. In 1938, Nazi-Fascist harassment had forced her to leave the University of Milan and undertake an escape that took her from Italy to Yugoslavia, Switzerland, Austria, and finally Latin America. She returned to Europe in 1966 for an exhibition at Signals Gallery in London and took part in the 1968 Venice Biennial. But that vertiginous passage across lands where different languages were spoken marked a search associated with the experience of being in the world. In the Objetos gráficos (Graphic Objects) series, she combined hand-made signs from real and invented alphabets, with industrial letter sets. Her small Babels full of signs and enigmatic strokes on rice paper are sheltered by transparent acrylics. Made to gravitate, these works invert order and perhaps suggest another language. Schendel’s words—as much as her personal story—shed light on the meaning of pieces of unquestionable beauty, stripped of anything useless. “In a way, I wanted to make something different, something in which I could translate the temporal problematic of transitioness. That is, the ephemeral object, so that anyone could take this paper and make knots like my daughter would do when she was ten years old.”4 Thus came to be, at the end of the 70s, her iconic pieces interwoven with Japanese paper turned into strings and knots: the Droguinhas (Little Nothings). In the midst of a dictatorship, in the 1969 São Paulo Biennial, Schendel created the almost invisible installation Ondas Paradas de Probabilidade (Still Waves of Possibilities), with thousands of nylon threads suspended from the roof that curve as they fall: a rain of light forming a transparent cube. On the wall, a written psalm reveals that the presence of God is not in the wind, nor in the earthquake or the fire, but in the “soft whisper.” Many of her works—like Trenzinho (Little Train), 1965, with its silent paper sheets hanging from a thread—contain that whisper, connected to her “emptiness of the world.” Schendel induces us to the “experience of passage,” but this passage is one that “leads the individual to dissolve and become another.”5 Even at the end of her life, she did not feel completely understood. But the poetry of all her creations continues to illuminate us. In 2014, London’s Tate Modern organized a historic exhibition in her name. 1 https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/2836-mira-schendel. 2 Excerpt from Mira Schendel’s deposition at the Department of Research of Brazilian Art of the Fundaçao Armando Alvares Penteado, São Paulo, August 19, 1977. p.6. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Salztein, Sônia. “In the Void of the World” in Vazio do mundo. Mira Schendel. Exhibition Catalog, Galería do Arte Do Sesi (1996-1997), Ed. Marca D´Água, São Paulo, 1996.

MIRA SCHENDEL Untitled, 1979 Embroidery and acrylic on fabric 72 x 38 1/4 in (183 x 97 cm) Jorge M. Pérez Collection, Miami

An indefatigable reader of spiritual and religious texts from all cultures, born into a Jewish family, Schendel thought that art was beyond magic and religion and allowed for “real relationships,” as she wrote in a letter to Guy Brett.1 This work, broidered with the same delicacy with which she treated all surfaces, suggests the form of a segmented cross. But in its center, there is no figure attached: only a circle formed by a void, a key to her human and artistic quest. With a playful gesture, she broidered her own name in an off-centered place inside the “nothing,” much in the same ways that sheets and other objects were marked aforetime with the initials of the master of the house. Unlike in other works, she used lowercase letters to spell out—without a date—her signature: “Mira,” which in Portuguese is also a form of the verb “look.” The piece’s design plays with symmetry but includes colors or cuts that interrupt and enliven it. Small ovals or rhombs in orange or violet alter the variation in the blues; the form of the cross is fragmented with an empty rectangle and a double line frames the edge of another rectangular void that gives continuity to the circle. The alterations of the previewed order add beauty to the whole. The broidered piece certainly recalls her words: “I can’t make a theoretical distinction between an aesthetic object and a common-use object, since a common-use object can also be aesthetic.”2 This untitled piece is similar to the carefully hand-broidered domestic ornamental objects such as mantels that are common in Brazil and Portugal. This similarity between aesthetic and everyday objects extends the difficulty of distinguishing a sacred and an artistic object. Perhaps with her zeal of reconciling opposites, this artwork is simultaneously a home ornament and an art piece containing a mystic message. 1 Ibid. Brett, Guy. “Actively the Void” en No vazio do mundo. Mira Schendel, Op. cit. p.57. 2 Salztein, Sônia. Op cit. p.6.

To Schendel, her friendship with engineer, astrophysicist, art critic and thinker Mário Schenberg was a gift. As a visionary, he contemplated since the 1950s the sidereal forces behind her rigorous art. If she was interested in the void and transparency, he was drawn to the disappearance of energy in the center of a star. Schenberg introduced Schendel to friends that escorted her in her lonesome path, like the founder of concrete poetry Haroldo de Campos, and gave her sheets of Japanese rice paper that originated iconic works such as these 1964 monotypes. Schendel looked for an indirect way of drawing. The monotypes transfer ink to the transparent acrylic sheet. The ink then permeates to the absorbent surface of the delicate paper to which it is juxtaposed. The random opening brought about by the effect of pressure and the unpredictable expansion of the ink generates an asymmetry in these works that conjugates, with its transparency, the projection of the shadow, and reconciles “materiality and immateriality, different approaches to the challenging paradox of language.”1 Mira Schendel had discovered acrylic by chance in a neon sign store. Transparency attains in this material an uncommon visual lightness and the possibility of eliminating the framework. No other material was as perfect to contain, with the required silence, these monotypes in rice paper that simultaneously house the gestures of open forms and their own way to “activate the void”. In a letter to Guy Brett, she explained: “I’d say that, sometimes, the line only stimulates the void (…) what really matters in my work is the void, activating the void.” The finding of transparent acrylic allowed her “the idea of doing away with front and back, before and after and so on, while presenting a more or less debatable notion of simultaneity.”2 Besides, the “drawing” expands and continues with its shadow on the wall, so that it is not only seen from both sides, but it also approaches invisibility and a mode of intangible tri-dimensionality. Schenberg’s gift allowed Schendel, as de Campos noticed about her quest, to contain the sense of the Hebraic sign einsof (endless): “(…) the universe as a great retraction that later propels into an existential yes. A void that retracts and then burst out in a completeness.”3 And in fact, in a work in mixed technique on paper, she painted on a red square, as if floating, the Portuguese word “sim”— another way to utter that infinite “yes.” In these delicate monotypes suspended in semi-translucent rice paper—protected by a transparent material that allows a previously unimagined vision of the drawing—there is an energy capable of transforming the present and future of art. Brett writes: “At this moment in the mid-60s, Mira was in full light on a form of production that would, in a special way, renew the capacity of art as a process of sensitization.”4 1 Vaz, Suzane. December 19, 2013. https://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/mira-schendel-you-shall-see-the-difference-now-that-i-am-back-again. 2 Brett, Guy. Op. Cit., p.57 3 De Campos, Haroldo. Interview with Salztein, Sonia. No vazio do mundo. Op. Cit. p.233. 4 Brett, Guy. Op. Cit., p.57

MIRA SCHENDEL Monotipia Monotype on rice paper 17 x 9 in (43 x 23 cm)

MIRA SCHENDEL Monotipia V Monotype on rice paper 17 x 9 in (43 x 23 cm)

MANCA FOTO, deve arrivare

LYGIA CLARK Brazil, 1920 - 1988

Portrait of Lygia Clark - Mute Thought (Pensamento mudo), 1971, Ref. No. 20455. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of “The World of Lygia Clark”, Cultural Association.

“A Casa é o Corpo” (The house is the body). This statement, the title of a work by Lygia Clark, was used as a wall text in her retrospective The Abandonment of Art1, 2014, at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. The creative phases in which this exhibition managed to gather nearly 300 of her pieces corresponded to her artistic trajectory: the initial geometric abstraction; the works related to the neo-concrete movement, when she and other artists like Hélio Oiticica rebelled in Rio de Janeiro against the “dangerous hypertrophy of rationalism” in concrete art; and the jump towards sensorial and relational practices of “rites without myths.”2 All these made her conception of art’s final frontier one of the most radical and bravest. Clark reconnected not only geometry with the organic, but also the idea of making art with the body of others —a collective body— as an extension of her own, in search of a common roof where it is possible to heal creatively. Her A Casa é o Corpo installation was built in 1968 with a plastic balloon at the center of the structure, and lateral compartments where the people were invited to revive symbolically and sensitively their own process inside the maternal womb from conception to birth. Two decades before this installation, in 1947, Clark had been studying painting in Brazil with masters such as the influential Roberto Burle Marx—a crucial figure in Latin America for his integration of art, design and urban architecture—and in Europe with Fernand Léger, among others. She inaugurated her first exhibition shortly after her return in 1962 at Rio de Janeiro’s Salão Nacional de Arte Moderna, and in 1965 she had a retrospective at Signar Gallery in London. Throughout this decade, her need to reconnect geometry with the life of others continued to drive her. After renouncing color and starting to work exclusively in black and white, she created the first Bichos with hinges, “creatures” made to be touched and transformed on contact. In Paris, where she moved after the military coup of 1964, she turned over to psychoanalysis—studying with Pierre Fédida and reading Georg Groddeck—and started the process of changing the direction and perception of her practice. She increased the making of transitional objects like the Trepantes (Trailings), Moebius strips meant to be progressively cut to the point where the form of the strip vanishes. She took part in all the São Paulo Biennials until 1967. She was at the Venetia Biennial four times between 1954 and 1968 and was granted the Guggenheim International Award twice (1958, 1960). By the mid-seventies she pioneered relational aesthetics and went even further than that: she created objects and atmospheres for therapeutic experiences in which there could no longer be spectators. At the end of the decade, after extensive showings of her work, she abandoned artistic production (or turned it into a social practice on the borderline of psychodrama3). The Antoni Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona presented the Lygia Clark exhibition in 1997. Her name has a universal resonance associated to the search without concessions of artistic truth. Yve-Alan Bois declared himself incapable of writing her obituary, of summing up her achievements in just a few words. Years later, in his “Nostalgia of the Body”4 essay, he wrote: “I believe that Lygia lived her art like no one has ever done.” 1 Organized by Luis Pérez-Oramas, The Estrellita Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art, MoMA; and Connie Butler, Chief Curator, Hammer Museum. 2 Bois, Yve Alain. “Lygia Clark: Nostalgy of the Body.” The MIT Press. October, Vol. 69 (Summer 1994), pp. 85-109. 3 Ibid, p.88. 4 Ibid, p.85.

LYGIA CLARK Caranguejo, 1984 AluminIium 9 x 6 x 7 in (23 x 150 x 18 cm) Brillembourg Capriles Collection

This marvelous Caranguejo (crab), generously ceded by the Brillembourg Capriles Collection, gives me remorse: to keep it saved in an acrylic box, separated from the public by this transparent protection, is not what Lygia Clark wanted for her Bichos. Paradoxically, the lockout corresponds our eagerness to preserve each “bicho,” a protective measure associated with the “aura” conferred to it for being made by one of the most iconic neo-concrete artists. But in truth, her entire work purported—as curator, historian, but above all, dearest friend, Yve-Alain Bois, wrote—the “disappearance of the author,” while encouraging the interactive experience. What’s left, then, is to recover on this paper the original sense of the work, a metallic animal that gains life and sense upon being touched, transformed by the encounter with others. Bois states it clearly: “The Animals [Bichos] look like abstract sculptures; with the black-and-white paintings of the 1950s, they are in appearance her most exhibitable and most photographic works. But one should not be deceived: they are inaccessible to anyone not engaged in combat with them, to anyone not unfolding them.”1 Clark explained: “When I am asked how many movements the Bicho can execute, I reply, ‘I have no idea, nor do you—but the Bicho knows….’ Each Bicho is an organic entity that only reveals itself totally within its internal expressive time… It’s a living organism, an essentially active work. A total, existential integration is established between it and you. A passive attitude is impossible between you and the Bicho, either on its part or on yours.”2 In 1986 and 1987, at Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Lygia Clark saw the crowds interacting with objects manufactured from the models displayed on the exhibition’s tables. The desire to have contact imbued in all the things she created in order to be touched can still be satisfied—even if the circumstances impede physical manipulation by everybody—by means of recreation, or even the language that brings us back the original nature of each Bicho. 1 Ibid, p. 86. 2 “Lygia Clark. Estudos E Maquete” at Allison Jacques Gallery. Exhibition text (September 8-October 9 2010).

MERCEDES PARDO Venezuela, 1921 - 2005

Portrait of Mercedes Pardo Courtesy of Otero Pardo Foundation

There is a legacy in Mercedes Pardo’s paintings that is still expecting universal recognition. But her trail is not limited to this medium: her powerful, extensive graphic work contributes to the comprehension of chromatic systems. She also made collages, and her multidisciplinary work in dialogue with architectonic space includes stained glass windows and—as in Sonia Delaunay’s case—theatrical sets and costumes design. She was also a major pioneer in art pedagogy, encompassing museums, schools and workshops in underserved areas. Pardo studied art in Caracas and Santiago de Chile, where she had her first individual exhibition at 27. She arrived in Paris in 1949 with a scholarship and, ignoring the Dadaistic exhortation to burn the Louvre, became an apprentice of André Lhote and Jean Cassou. In 1952, she and Kosnit-Kloss were the only two women artists included in the Espace Lumière exhibition (Galerie Suzanne Michel, Paris) organized by Carmelo Arden Quin. Alejandro Otero (whom she had married a few years before) also participated in the exhibition, along with artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Jesús R. Soto. In 1956, she participated in the First Abstract Art Salon in Caracas, and in 1959 in the São Paulo Biennial. Her investigative spirit led her into an alternating journey in search of color and rhythm in geometric abstraction. But, also fascinated by the matter, she embraced the textures and gestures of informalism, as evidenced in the Huellas series of the early 1960s. After returning to Venezuela, amidst the enthusiasm unleashed by Carlos Raúl Villanueva’s proposal of integration of the arts at Caracas’ Ciudad Universitaria, she participated in the exhibition that introduced informalism in Venezuela: Espacios vivientes, 1960. In her book Signes (1963), the use of frottages of found objects allows us to track down her indefatigable quest. Her inquiries on fluctuating color systems according to their positions and relations in the 1x9, Color de la serigrafía exhibition (Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, 1969) were referential and reveal certain keys to her creative processes. Pardo not only made sketches of her paintings, but small-sized replicas playing with infinite chromatic possibilities. She sometimes experimented in a parallel way with serigraphic flat colors that she invented herself. Distancing herself from Cinetismo’s relationship with color, she stated: “When you get a color chord vibrating with the same intensity, the produced vibration is emotional.”1 The idea of intervening space led her to fluctuate between occupying it with chromatic planes organized in geometrical shapes and composed with a rhythmic sense, or with color expatiated in the gestures of a mode of lyric abstraction, to use the term coined by Larry Aldrich. The proof that her painting was, in her own words, “an existential fact”2 appears in Viva Diana, 1989; a work that contains the joy of being a grandmother while creating a visual dance of soft color planes playfully shifting between a vast and intense blue and the emptiness of white. Mercedes Pardo lived unceasingly fulfilling the task of “inventing herself,” which critic Harold Rosenberg propounded for artists at a time when the meaning of art flowed in the function of its own creation. In 1978, she was granted the National Prize of Pictorial Arts and had a retrospective show at Mexico’s Museo de Arte Moderno. In 1991 the Galería de Arte Nacional carried out her anthological exhibition Moradas del color. 1 D´ Amico, Margarita. “Mercedes Pardo: 1 x 9,” in El Nacional (Caracas, Venezuela). Nov. 28, 1969. 2 Chacón, Katherine. “Entrevista a Mercedes Pardo: Mi lenguaje plástico está ligado a lo vivencial”, Imagen, Caracas, N° 100-84, Dic. 1991, pp. 26-27.

MERCEDES PARDO Untitled, 1981 Acrylic on canvas 19 1/2 x 25 1/2 in (50 x 65 cm)

This 1981 work in small format is remarkably beautiful. Perhaps because Pardo makes us understand that, like Ellsworth Kelly, she has made color the epicenter of her creation. In this case she also shares the way in which the fringes construct spatial structure. But heading in a different direction than Mondrian, color has been made a field of ceaseless invention in her search for beauty. The work shows three large transversal sections with tonal variations. The emotive force of the predominant blues remits us to a horizon of exclusively pictorial nature, but Pardo leads us to understand that the world is a huge color space vibrating in harmony. In the lower section of the painting, where tonality approaches gray, a subtle square reveals itself to the thoughtful eye: a different hue is enough to create it. And the compositional wisdom with which Pardo inserts fringes that dwindle alternatively from one side to the other creates a rhythm and a dynamism of planes. In the immensity of blues, a white line enters from the left, alternating with a green one that seems to come from the right, and is followed by a thin red “chord” and an “almost” straight horizontal fringe of an invented red wine color. The total width of these small zones is not larger than the clearer blue fringe of this horizon of perfect proportions.

ZILIA SÁNCHEZ Cuba, 1926 -

Portrait of Zilia Sanchez Photo by Xavier García Courtesy of Museo Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico.

As a child, Zila Sánchez watched her father paint, and “shrieked” if anyone tried to get her away. “I grew up to be a painter,” she says. In the video that accompanies the retrospective Zilia Sánchez: Soy Isla, in the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 2019, she evokes herself as Eve eating the apple that the teachers at the Academy ask her to paint, and then painting the work she wants to make. “I’ve never been submissive, not even when I wanted to learn something (…) I love freedom in things and I’m still just as free.” This furious freedom is the one trait approaching her to Picasso’s spirit (but not to his painting). She is also inspired by legendary, defiant women that have originated several series: Antigone, who disobeys the tyrant’s orders and faces his power in order to comply with the laws of fraternal love; the mythological Amazons, who cut one breast off in order to shoot better; or the Trojans, those captive women—like Andromache—who after the fall of Troy often managed to reverse, in their own way, many a tragic destiny. This disobedient artist had her first individual exhibition in 1953, four years before her graduation from Havana’s Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro, at the time when she also had her debut as a stage designer. By the end of the 60s she had found her own unmistakable language, the capacity to use minimalism at will and turn the flat canvas into a skin that incites touch, a body that displays the voluptuous protuberances of the feminine erogenous zones, as can be seen in her Amazona, 1968. This work, made when she had already been living in New York for four years, lacks the modular repetition that would eventually lead her to duplicate or multiply her compositions in a single work. But in the painting, tensed with a background that serves to construct the volume of the piece, there is already the tip, tactile and defiant, of a nipple. Thence, the title—twice used—of the exhibition that the Museo de las Américas de San Juan, Puerto Rico held in her honor, after nearly three decades in the shadows, was fairly appropriate: Heróicas Eróticas, 2000. The exhibition was repeated in 2014—a year after the Zila Sánchez exhibition in the Artists Space in New York—when the Galerie Lelong organized a show that proved decisive for her insertion into the world’s memory. Since the late 1950s until the early 1970s, she exhibited in institutions and universities in Madrid and Barcelona, at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Venezuela, at the gallery of the great novelist and neo-baroque theoretician Severo Sarduy in New York in 1970, and in San Juan de Puerto Rico, where she has lived since 1972. However, in the three ensuing decades, her work remained almost unknown. The only museum to show her work was, in fact, the Museo Casa Roig, Humacao, Puerto Rico, in 1991. In the Big Apple, the market failed to understand the unmatchable power of her tactile canvases exhibited at Intar Latin American Gallery in 1984. But Zila Sánchez kept on painting, nurtured by the island’s sea and the infinite journey to the body that she often conceives as duplicated in modules that meet and mirror each other, and that can thrust themselves into forms that evoke the slit of the feminine sex. Construcciones en secuencia, Casa Sofia, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2009, gathered her now world-renowned acrylics on canvas; tensed, fragmented, and repeated in modular partitions that can always be deployed in different ways, like the act of love. Zilia Sánchez turns the space of geometric representation into a planet where curves and lines, protuberances and cleavages—almost always forming the vertical smile—are tensed like drums to be reconnected to the erogenous zones of the feminine body as an omnipresent territory. In the eight years she spent in New York, between 1964 and 1972, she began to develop a technique of stretching on hand-made wooden frames. The construction of reliefs created from the tensions between these moldings, thought to evoke bodies, is in itself a formal novelty; but by reconnecting geometry with the feminine topography of Eros, she creates a grammar of desire turned over onto that territory.

ZILIA SÁNCHEZ Serie infinita, topografía erótica, (n.d.) 3 panels 36 x 18 in each (92 x 46 cm) Private Collection

There are Zilia Sánchez´works of the 1970s—after the arrival of human beings on the moon—that evoke the moon as a parallel reiteration to the work shown undated that she entitled Serie Infinita, topología erótica, that displays the possibility of modular variations on the erogenous zones of the feminine body’s geography. To the acrylic on canvas tensed on frames to create volumes suggesting the maximal aesthetic but also corporal tension, she adds—like in this wonderful triptych—modules containing the possibility to change the configurations of her approaches in an unlimited way. Thus, she turned the flat canvas into a woman’s body, with volumes and cleavages, inhabited by Eros and therefore infinitely changing. The ceaseless repetition of her modules, at once abstract and corporal, could be perfectly well inscribed into post-minimalism. But no, it is just the one and only Zilia Sánchez.

LYGIA PAPE

Brazil, 1927 - 2004

When Lygia Pape moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1952, she was 25 years old, and her searching spirit made a connection with the Grupo Frente and its explorations on the relationships between concrete art and Gestalt. But between this decade and the next—coinciding with the avalanche of developmentalism—she would become one of the pioneers of “a renegade faction of concretism”1: neo-concretism, which pursued the reconnection of art with life with such radicalism that it has not yet been fully assimilated. Always challenging the traits of each medium—from engraving to experimental films and performance—Pape surpassed the “excessive rationalism” of a geometry that had lost all of its vitality, as the 1959 Manifiesto Neoconcreto argued. Capable of oscillating between maximal aesthetic subtlety and open support of the visceral, her multiform art, inseparable from affectivity, acted as the sap of an “inescapable movement of desire against a culture that had separated itself from life, reclaiming access to the vibrating body as a compass for a permanent reinvention of existence.” Her Tecelares appeared in that vibrant decade, challenging concrete tradition. She used xylography, associated with the reproduction of popular figurative iconographies to create in each case a single abstract work, concentrating her desire to fuse the visual and the tactile. She explored the idea of ambiguity—“no privileged position for up and down”—“magnetizing”2 space with incisions of white lines, and works leaving traces like “scars on a skin with a history of its own.”3 She renovated the medium by arriving at the use of black and white alone as bi-dimensional forms. In her later metal sculptures Amazoninos, she moved to intense red, but challenged the properties of a material like iron and created the paradoxical impression of lightness. On the other hand, using the format of a hand-held object for reading, the book, she creates a “tactile epistemology”4 with paper works such as the Livro da Criação (Book of Creation) (1959–62). Loose pages of geometric planes in color display in space a unique story of Genesis for each reader to reassemble. Interactivity is enhanced in works like Divisor (Divider), carried out in 1968 with children from one of Rio’s favelas who inserted their heads in the orifices of a large sheet, thus joining their bodies to a work conformed by all. These are “pluri-sensorial works that mobilize and invite the spectator’s participation and the incorporation of his energy.” In the Ttéia (1979-2004) installations, with filaments that submerge the spectator, she also conjugated the neologism that illuminated her quest: “epidermization,” something that only occurs when the immersed spectator finds out the role of corporeity in the act of seeing and knowing.5 In this decade, historical exhibitions at the Museo Reina Sofía de Madrid, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Stockholm’s Moderna Museet have recovered her art as a means to understand the world.

1 Rotnik, Suely. “Molding a Contemporary Soul: The Empty-Full of Lygia Clark”, at The Experimental Exercise of Freedom: Lygia Clark, Gego, Mathías Goeritz, Hélio Oiticica, and Mira Schendel (Exhibition Catalog), organized by Rina Carvajal and Alma Ruiz and presented at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1999-2000, p. 69. 2 Absury, Michael. https://www.phillips.com/article/7697533/the-pioneering-story-of-lygia-pape. The author cites Paulo Herkenhoff’s considerations in the catalog of the exhibition titles after one of the photographic series she made of urban life during the dictatorship, Magnetized Spaces. Espacio Imantado at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, in cooperation with ProjetoL ygia Pape, 2011. 3 “‘Like the Skin of A Whale’: The Pluri-Sensorial Art of Lygia Pape,” in Lygia Pape, ed. Olivier Renaud-Clément, New York, NY: Hauser & Wirth, 2018, pp. 8-25. 4 Ibid, p. 17. 5 ibid, p. 19.

LYGIA PAPE 22599 Drawings (Desenhos), 1959 India Ink on Japanese paper 20,8 x 17,3 in (53 x 44 cm) Nara Roesler Collection

LYGIA PAPE 22609 Drawings (Desenhos), 1959 India Ink on Japanese paper 20,8 x 17,3 in (53 x 44 cm) Nara Roesler Collection

In the small-format works of the Desenhos series (1957-1959), carried out in Indian ink on fragile Japanese paper, there is a patent interest for the ambiguity between media—engraving and drawing—as well as the relationship between geometry and perception. Space is ruptured not only in the way that geometry is constructed by a strategy of voids, interruptions or displacements, but also in how forms burst into the line-furrowed field so subtly that only a careful perception grasps, in one of the Desenhos, the existence of circles. Berkeley’s idea that only the perceived exists is visualized here. Meanwhile, concretism’s precepts are disobeyed. The fragility of the paper—like a thin skin—and the playful construction strategies like the use of crossed diagonals, connect with the levity and ludic creative freedom with which Pape assumed forms. In one of the papers, the superimposition of the two circles could even suggest the apparition of a crescent moon, a perceptive allusion that responds to the context of the foundational moment of Neo-concretism and the increasing need to go from the optical to the organic and vital. These are compositions with rhythms and pauses that refer to the conjunction of one hand ordering and disordering the space while expecting a myriad of sensible regards. Both works were part of the Lygia Pape: Magnetized Space retrospectives (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain, 2011; Serpentine Galleries, London, UK, 2011-2012; and Estação Pinacoteca, São Paulo, Brazil, 2012).

LÍA BERMÚDEZ Venezuela, 1930 -

Courtesy of Lía Bermúdez

“I’m not Carmen Rosalía González. She disappeared over sixty years ago, to make room for Lía Bermúdez,” declares this abstract sculptress who as a teenager entered the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Aplicadas de Caracas, a men’s world. But her father encouraged her rare capacity to “invent things” and she has always created with no other limit than the infinite horizon of her “dialog with matter.” She graduated at 20, in 1950, from Maracaibo’s Escuela de Artes Plásticas, then directed by Jesús R. Soto, who was surprised by her partiality toward abstract language: “The copying of nature has never interested me.” It was unheard of an artist from the provinces to hold such views when Caracas was still a few years from becoming an avant-garde epicenter in response to the Paris Dissidents, who in that same year launched their Manifiesto No. “Soto impressed me because he never pointed a road for me. ‘This is the material. Do whatever you want,’ he told me. He always supported me. I also learned a lot from Víctor Valera,” she remembers. She still keeps a rare portrait of hers made by Soto when she was pregnant. When she posed for it, at the age of 20, she was already a blacksmith. “I was lucky to find in a street in Maracaibo the workshop of a Catalonian blacksmith. I saw him working and I was amazed by how the shape was forged when it was dipped into the water. I wanted to learn so I could invent abstract forms with iron. I started to experiment, and I was lucky that he let me borrow his space to work with metal.” She discovered that iron could be bended, and that the process of creation was faster than with the mud of her first sculptures: “It was a wonderful material for its ductility: I folded it, stretched it, felt it, but the process was too slow.” Lía Bermúdez was always a dynamo. For seven decades she melted, welded, and sculpted abstract forms, initially in the original color of metal. “I didn’t want them to have any explicit reference to nature, but to life itself. The more abstract the form, the closer the sculpture can get to what we don’t know,” she says. Her later predilection for monochromatic sculptures of intense yellows and blues, reds and blacks, has to do with the physiology of color perception. This without excluding experimentations with secondary tones. Lía Bermúdez had her first individual exhibition at Maracaibo’s Centro de Bellas Artes in 1957, and the same year she took part in the collective sculpture show at Havana’s Lyceum. 26 years later the same Venezuelan institution organized another personal exhibition in the city she adopted the minute she saw Lake Maracaibo. She also taught drawing and graphic art at the Facultad de Arquitectura de la Universidad de Zulia. When she was tasked with restoring the central building of the city’s market, she turned it into the Centro de Arte de Maracaibo Lía Bermúdez. Her public artworks can be seen in numerous buildings in Maracaibo and Caracas—like at the entrance of the Corte Suprema de Justicia or at the Colegio de Ingenieros—where she installed reliefs, murals and sculptures conceived in a dialog with space, as forms capable of transforming the environment. The French government invited her as a consultant when the Musee d’Orsay was going to be built. In 1979 the OAS Americas Museum organized an individual exhibition of her work in Washington DC, and a decade later the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas did the same. In 2006 she was awarded Venezuela’s National Price of Art.

LÍA BERMÚDEZ Maitta, 2015 Painted Iron 37 x 48 x 4 1/4 in (94 x 122 x 11 cm)

The tridimensional nature of this iron relief painted in intense red is constructed with the juxtaposition of a double set of different dimensions of parallelepipeds of curved lines, like the shadow projected on the wall that expands the set of formal tensions in space. A sense of playfulness and potential variations, an aesthetic freedom, as well as a poetic binding enliven these works by Lía Bermúdez. The name choices pay homage to Wayúu culture, whose abstract geometric patterns respond to a precise symbolism of the cosmos. But their shapes are unrelated to any kind of representation or interpretation of nature or culture. Rather, they are geometric approaches looming over that threshold of art which cannot be named or defined, but perhaps only signaled with a powerful language that we ignore. “The relationships between the words used by indigenous people are so beautiful that I tried to remake them somehow,” she recalls. Perhaps form is a rhythmical response to sonority, much in the same way that a heartbeat originates the universe.

LÍA BERMÚDEZ Mariposa, 1978 Painted stainless steel and iron 60 x 43 1/4 in (152 x 110 cm)

As Amalia Caputo explains regarding Lía Bermúdez’s work, her titles are usually associated to elements of nature—another connection to her habitat. Abstract nerved wings, oversized leaves, anatomical animal shapes and giant butterflies comprise her poetic imagery, reminiscent of the lavish and opulent tropics that influence her sculptures.1 What we see in her metal creations is a way of poetic apprehension of nature, and never its literal imitation. In this particular piece made in the early 70s, there is a geometric approximation to the ancestral—and impossible—search for the quadrature of the circle. The central composition is made up of a quadrangular circle of black iron that instead of right angles has curves in the corners, fusing both figures. In its interior, this geometric shape is repeated and duplicated. The combination of the organic forms with the title of the piece ─Mariposa (Butterfly), and the speculative character of stainless steel connect the two squared circles to the ocular and to the game of different perceptive levels. The piece’s vital force is increased by the succession of vertical iron segments of different lengths that are juxtaposed on the central axis, suggesting pupils or in any case a corporeal extension. The piece looks at us and contains us. Perhaps it sees us through the eyes of a butterfly, which were created to determine the brightness of light and which can capture spectra not visible to the human eye, like ultraviolet light. The metal “eyes” function formally as a mirror of spectators themselves, and it is already known that gaze changes the behavior of matter itself. 1 Caputo, Amalia. Lía Bermúdez. Akalia. (Exhibition brochure) April 2017.

FANNY SANÍN Colombia, 1938 -

Portrait of Fanny Sanín Photo by Mayer Sasson Courtesy of Fanny Sanín

The most renowned geometrician of her generation in Colombia had a cosmopolitan education. After graduating in 1960 in Fine Arts from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, she studied art history and engraving in Illinois in 1962, and spent several periods in Mexico and England, where she specialized in engraving at the Chelsea School of Art in London. Critic John Stringer would point out that the physical experience of these territories had a bearing on her palette1. By 1965, she had already displayed in an individual exhibition at Bogota’s Museo de Arte Moderno the genesis of a brief period of expressionist abstraction. In 1967, she had yet another individual show at Caracas’ Museo de Bellas Artes. In parallel, she was selected by a jury that included Roland Penrose, the great introducer of Surrealism to England, for a participation in the I Edinburgh Open 100 Festival in Scotland. The Art of the Real exhibition in 1968 in New York showcased “the development of abstract art which maximizes color and minimizes form,”2 revealing to her the influential work of the artists that Clement Greenberg associated with “color field” or “post-pictorial abstraction,” while encouraging a crucial transition under the explicit precept: “May my work always be my work.”3 Since 1969, Sanín has followed her own and obstinate way in a uniquely synthetized geometric abstraction, containing a painstakingness in the design of structures; a rationality testified by the meticulous studies in paper anteceding each painting; and a vital, organic, intuitive sensibility to work with color that is impossible to repeat from work to work. Undaunted by the initial indifference toward the abstract work of a Latin American geometrician in New York, where she has lived since 1971, and ever faithful to the canvas, she has persevered in what she calls “my color painting.” Beyond the different stages chronologically classified by critics—the passage from her inquiries with vertical stripes, to the successive incorporation of horizontals and diagonals, as well as curves and the probing exploration of symmetry, for instance—Marta Traba’s definition of her work remains timelessly accurate: “She has used geometry to perceive the world as something quiescent and intense, as a stable structure that can perfectly well be permeated by emotion without disruption.”4 Her creative process is marked by a contention, an order that is also permeated by traces of the color memory of the world, shown through her endeavor to conceive colors and structures in a meditative way, or perhaps as someone creating a musical composition. In fact, she listens to music while plunging into creation, and appreciates that John Stringer mentions this parallelism between rhythm and artistic creation in the catalog of her second individual exhibition at Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá in 1987. She also had an individual exhibition at Mexico City’s Museo de Arte Moderno in 1979, the same year she represented Colombia at the 15th São Paulo Biennial. She later exhibited at Bogota’s Museo de Arte del Banco de la República (2000), and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC (2017). Her work is part of the permanent collections of these museums; of the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, Bogota, and the Museo La Tertulia, Cali, Colombia; as well as of the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, and the Minnesota Museum of Art, St. Paul, USA; and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Monterrey, Mexico. 1 Stringer, John. “Introduction,” in Fanny Sanín: Obras de 1960 a 1986, exh. cat. (Bogotá: Museo de ArteModerno, 1987). P. 11. 2 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_press-release_326571.pdf 3 Fanny Sanín interview, June 2019. 4 Fanny Sanín 1987–1999 Color y Simetría, Bogotá: Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, 2000. P. 8.

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FANNY SANÍN Acrylic No. 2, 1990 Acrylic on canvas 58 1/4 x 50 in (148 x 127 cm) Jorge M. Pérez Collection, Miami

This painting, labeled No. 2 in a system of classification and naming consigning the order of creation and corresponding date, has a story revealing the singularity of the artist’s relationship with color: During an itinerant exhibition, it suffered damage and the attempt to repair it was not satisfactory. But the artist was so fond of the work— with its vertical stripes interrupted by sudden diagonals, areas of horizontal pigment sand a complex compositional game of perfect symmetry from the frontal black fringe— that she decided to break it and make it again from scratch. But unlike Josef Albers, who kept precise notes of each of his mixtures, her application of color is emotive and the fact that she makes her own colors that vary from one work to the next implies difficulty in repeating them. She had to work very hard to find again, through the study of the painting, the exact blue, the flesh color, and the tenuous beige (those colors charged with an organicity that bestows life to forms), until she finally managed to satisfactorily reconstruct this work of her predilection. “My geometry—she recalls—is not linked to intellectual principles like the work of the Madí artists.” When she thinks of painting, the beauty of the colors found in the world resonates deep inside her, and though she never represents any of the forms, she maintains a naturality that provokes a mode of contemplation parallel to that of the observer of the inimitable colors of any location.

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FANNY SANÍN Acrylic No 2, 1999 Acrylic on canvas 54 x 62 in (137 x 157 cm) Private Collection

The frontality of Sanín’s paintings has been described by different critics. Although she does not acknowledge any referential connection, Carlos M. Luis was not without reason when he linked certain compositions like this second 1999 painting to the perception of sacral architectonic spaces, such as the thresholds of an altar or temple. John Stringer (1987) also alludes to a certain architectonic tenor in the works in which axial symmetry, centrality and monumentality suggest an association to temple-like spaces. At any rate, we are facing structures that are connected in the archetypal imagination to ascending forms such as the cross or the column, and that induce contemplation of formal beauty in a work that keeps non-temporal references. She insists on symmetry while praising the asymmetric, perhaps with identical conviction as the line in John Keats’ poem: “Beauty is joy forever.” But she opposes or complements the rigid central structure with a complex set of mixed tonalities and pigments, introducing an infinitude of variances. No color is pure: there are greenish grays, veiled greens culminating in ocher-tinged transparencies, blacks that turn into grey, a red that not only contains black, but also almost-invisible squares and polyhedrons with subtle tonal variations and more luminous zones— mixtures that are ultimately unique. The entire figure is illuminated by two extremes of incendiary yellow that make us raise our gaze. We are facing forms that suggest archetypical associations and that stand by themselves in a universe with its own command of technique and spirituality. Their compositional force is such, that whoever sees the work discovers endless new perceptual games.

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LYDIA OKUMURA Brazil, 1948 -

Courtesy of Lydia Okumura Photo by Kiyoshi Togashi

Lydia Okumura took part in Brazil’s artistic post-modernity with her powerful conceptual installations built with the greatest economy of means, and a set of inquiries including actions of institutional critique, paintings, drawings and photographs. In a way, her work turned the world into an origami that could be folded and unfolded in multiple manners. The whole of her work shows the relativity of the concepts of space and time, formal appearance and perception of reality, and the illusory character of the latter. She is a conceptual artist committed to transcendence: She works with the shifting nature of vision and the notion of pluridimensionality, both physical and ontological. She grew up in Brazil as the child of Japanese immigrants and found out that there were several ways to name and see the world. She studied in Portuguese in a Catholic school while her Shinto mother and Buddhist father spoke Japanese and followed their own rituals. Though she traces back the origins of her art to her close relationship with her calligrapher father, the bifid experience of languages and rites initiated her in the perceptual multiplicity of the world. Posterior conceptual works with written oxymoronic phrases, like Everything, Nothing Included, harmonized “the conflictive aspects of the different cultures to which I belonged,” states Okumura. The 1970 Tokyo Biennial influenced the way in which she incorporated minimalism, earth art, povera and conceptual art into her works. In 1971, a photographic record of a hundred work days at her regular job marked in cards with the intervals of the days in which she could dedicate time to her art, originated a pioneering collective conceptual exhibition at the Cultural Center SESC-Vila Nova. Being one of the randomly selected participant artists at the historical Jovem Arte Contemporânea (JAC) of the Museu de la Universidade de São Paulo (1972)— then directed by Walter Zanini—she decided to extend her right to exhibit to foreign artists like Jannis Kounelis and Daniel Buren, who were excluded because of their nationality. When she graduated from the fine arts school of FAAP in 1973, she participated in the São Paulo Biennial with the awarded interactive installation Ponto de vista, created by the Equipe 3 collective. Okumura studied with a scholarship at New York’s Pratt Graphics Center (1974-1978) and cooperated in the elaboration of Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings. Simultaneously, in the loft where she lived and created with minimal resources, she began to make sketches and create installations or “situations” between the floor and the wall. Painted geometric planes made with a minimum of elements—graphite lines and threads—became tridimensional works thanks to the effect of perceptive visual illusions they created. Her installation In Front of the Light, with drawing lines, natural light interventions on the black wall, and mirrors suspended from strings, received an award at the São Paulo Biennial in 1977. Curator Jacopo Crivelli Visconti considered that “by the way she handles a space simultaneously tangible and hypothetic (or utopic),” her installations and preparatory sketches had a close “relationship with iconic works of Brazilian art.” Okumura has had personal exhibitions in several institutions: the Museu de Arte Moderna and Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Brazil; the Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas, Venezuela; PS1, New York City, and an itinerant retrospective started in 2016 at the University of Buffalo Museum, Buffalo, United States. Her works belong to collections of museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Akron Art Museum, Ohio, in United States; as well as the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan.

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This set of works on paper made in the seventies already contains the conceptual vision of situations in which a minimal intervention (maybe a single line or a set of parallels) constructs perceptive experiences in motion and the emergence of tri-dimensionality. Further still, Okumura’s drawings in mixed medium generate a state of aperture toward new senses of imagination, about to suggest the notion of other worlds. One of the alterations in the perception of represented space is achieved through the fiction of a light beam seeping into the space from a place outside of it, as if the lighting came from beyond the physical plane. In As if the Surface is Deep, 1976, with acrylic paint and pencil on paper, the material planes of the wooden floor and a white wall become a space containing a spiritual emotion thanks to the suggestion of an extended beam of white light whose rays are subtly traced with pencil. The title contains the element of harmony of the contradictions that characterize her vision. In As if Circles Were Hidden for a Moment, 1977, the elongated sphere makes us imagine the circle as a flexible figure capable of expanding and changing its shape, an infinitude of pink lines are hidden in a plane that is fixed but that simultaneously represents the ethereal possibility of aerial lines about to fade away. It is as if an instant of something that is a state of being rather than an object had been captured, suggesting the possibility of glancing into the mystery of the invisible. In her installations, she replaces lines with threads, but in her drawings, there already exists a lesson on how a line is sufficient to alter the perception of time and space.

LYDIA OKUMURA Curve (Tryptich), 1976 Acrylic paint and graphite on paper 30 x 22 in each (76 x 56 cm)

LYDIA OKUMURA As if the Surface is Deep, 1976 Acrylic paint and pencil on paper 22 × 30 in (56 x 76 cm)

LYDIA OKUMURA As if Circles Were Hidden for a Moment, 1977 Acrylic paint and pencil on paper 22 × 30 in (76 x 56 cm)

Private Collection

Courtesy of Anke Kempkes Curatorship & Consulting

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LYDIA OKUMURA Untitled I, 1981 Acrylic paint, cotton string and painted aluminum 78 x 90 x 48 in (198 x 229 x 122 cm) Edition 4/4 + II AP First realized at Medellin Biennial, Colombia

The re-installation of this extraordinary work in Women Geometers added the reflective effect provided by the floor’s material that acted as a mirror in one of Okumura’s most iconic installations. Volume is constructed with three irregular parallelepipeds painted on the floor and wall, and with threads connecting and completing the figure. “You can trace a line with a pencil but it would be two dimensional. But if you place a thread as a line in space, in a corner, in an angle, then another dimension is inserted into the space,” Okumura explains. The estrangement of the visual effect is linked to the widening of vision. “The more you can imagine, the more interesting the whole thing is.” For her, the simple action of looking beyond is art that contains “a suggestion that there is more than one way of seeing.” A decade before this installation that tacitly correlates body, perception, and geometry, Okumura had the silhouette of her body, illuminated by the sun, marked with tape on a column and on the floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo. The photographs of Eu, o sol e MAC/Myself, the Sun and the Museum, 1971, taken at 2:00 pm, 3:30 pm and 4:45 pm reveal images of the changing shadow projected by her standing body as it interacts with the space. The resulting forms mark an exterior change in temporality, but her position remains the same, as if reafirming her unwavering artistic vision. With the smallest gestures—inserting a line or catching a shadow—Okumura seeks to create forms that echo with the universe. She states: “I hope my work can sound like music: in harmony, with pace, a ‘disquieting antenna for the cosmos,’ in the words of the critic who both acknowledged and supported us artists—the always dear, Mário Schenberg.”

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ABOUT

Piero Atchugarry Gallery

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Piero Atchugarry Gallery presents a contemporary art program and modern art survey. The gallery opened to the public in November 2013 with a Post-War Italian art exhibition. By January 2014, the gallery moved to a large stable adapted as an exhibition space in Garzรณn. In this space the program allowed outdoor and indoor proposal exploration, through the creation of dialogue between architectural features and curatorial practices. On December 2018, the program expanded to North America with a second location, a 9,000 sqf warehouse on 5520 NE 4th Avenue in the Design District neighborhood. The participation of the gallery in what is a boiling art community that connects Europe, Latin America and both coasts of the United States represents the commitment of the program to support and present the work of local and international artists with an institutional approach.

ABOUT

Pablo Atchugarry Foundation

In December 2018, the Pablo Atchugarry Foundation opened its second location in Miami, a space adjacent to the Piero Atchugarry Gallery. This institution, located near Miami’s Design District, aims to promote and to contribute to the development of modern and contemporary visual art, the history of art, and the passion for the arts within the Miami public. Over the course of 2019, the Foundation in Miami has had three exhibitions: José Pedro Costigliolo – La Vida de las Formas, curated by Enrique Aguerre, director of the Museo Nacional de Arte Visuales of Uruguay, was the first retrospective of the artist in the United States and the first since his death in 1983; What I Really Want to Tell You… curated by Jennifer Inacio, assistant curator at Perez Art Museum Miami, and Flavia Macuco, executive director of The55Project; Notices in a Mutable Terrain, a group exhibition organized by Miami-based, Haitian-born artist Adler Guerrier.

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