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Alejandro Otero
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Resonant Space
TThe Venezuelan painter and sculptor Alejandro Otero (1921-1990) was one of the most significant artists in the history of abstraction. Between 1955 and 1960, he developed an extraordinary series of 75 paintings called Coloritmos (Colorhythms), one of his major contributions to the field of painting. Painted with Duco, a shiny industrial lacquer applied with a spray gun or roller, the Colorhythms are large-scale compositional modules executed on rectangular support structures. In these works, Otero succeeded in emphasizing rhythm and color over form; as a consequence of optical intensity, chromatic vibration, and the suggestion of rhythmic movement, the pictures seem to expand dynamically outward. This illuminating book, the first dedicated to Colorhythms, evaluates their place in Otero's practice and in the context of international geometric abstraction.
Inverted Utopias
In the twentieth century, avant-garde artists from Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean created extraordinary and highly innovative paintings, sculptures, assemblages, mixed-media works, and installations. This innovative book presents more than 250 works by some seventy of these artists (including Gego, Joaquin Torres-Garcia, Xul Solar, and Jose Clemente Orozco) and artists' groups, along with interpretive essays by leading authorities and newly translated manifestoes and other theoretical documents written by the artists. Together the images and texts showcase the astonishing artistic achievements of the Latin American avant-garde. The book focuses on two decisive periods: the return from Europe in the 1920s of Latin American avant-garde pioneers; and the expansion of avant-garde activities throughout Latin America after World War II as artists expressed their independence from developments in Europe and the United States. As the authors explain, during these periods Latin American art was fueled by the belief that artistic creations could present a form of utopia - an inversion of the original premise that drove the European avant-garde - and serve as a model for
Killing Hope
Is the United States a force for democracy? From China in the 1940s to Guatemala today, William Blum presents a comprehensive study of American covert and overt interference, by one means or another, in the internal affairs of other countries. Each chapter of the book covers a year in which the author takes one particular country case and tells the story - and each case throws light on particular US tactics of intervention.
Radical Form
A timely reassessment of some of the most daring projects of abstraction from South America. Emphasizing the open-ended and self-critical nature of the projects of abstraction in South America from the 1930s through the mid-1960s, this important new volume focuses on the artistic practices of Joaquín Torres-García, Tomás Maldonado, Alejandro Otero, and Lygia Clark. Megan A. Sullivan positions the adoption of modernist abstraction by South American artists as part of a larger critique of the economic and social transformations caused by Latin America’s state-led programs of rapid industrialization. Sullivan thoughtfully explores the diverse ways this skepticism of modernization and social and political change was expressed. Ultimately, the book makes it clear that abstraction in South America was understood not as an artistic style to be followed but as a means to imagine a universalist mode of art, a catalyst for individual and collective agency, and a way to express a vision of a better future for South American society.
Alfredo Boulton and His Contemporaries
Alfredo Boulton (1908-1995) was Venezuela's foremost cultural and aesthetic observer of the 20th century. An art critic, cultural historian and photographer, he was highly influential in the development of modernist art and discourse, and of cultural self-definition, in Venezuela and the surrounding region. Boulton's diverse contributions serve as a point of departure in this remarkable selection of art-historical and critical texts by many of the prominent Latin American thinkers of this period, figures whose works and ideas helped to shape the face of contemporary Venezuela. Through the manifestos, correspondences and critical writings of these notable voices of the day, this anthology traces Venezuela's struggle toward modernity and toward a successful, autonomous identify on the international cultural scene. In addition to historical writings, the volume includes newly written critical and explanatory essays by contemporary scholars, providing context and insight to these significant texts that have become constant reference points for generations of artists, critics and art historians.
Gego
An authoritative study of Gego, whose distinctive modernist practice sits at the intersection of architecture, design, and the visual arts This important book is the first extended study of the life and work of German-born Venezuelan artist Gertrude Goldschmidt (1912-94), known as Gego. In locating the artist's contribution to postwar art and her important place in the global conversations around modernity, Mónica Amor explores her intermedial practice as a model of cultural complexity at the "edge of modernity." In situating Gego's work alongside other local archives and against her European education and global reception, Amor offers a monographic model that complicates traditional approaches to history. She investigates the full range of Gego's work, including her furniture workshop, her teaching at schools of architecture and design, her seminal reticuláreas, and her lesser-known prints. Through rigorous archival research, formal analysis, theoretical relevance, and deep exploration of historical context, this essential book unpacks Gego's radical recasting of the modern sculptural project through her engagement with architecture, craft, and design pedagogy.
Immanent Vitalities
A new reality for the art object has emerged in the world of contemporary art: it is now experienced less as an autonomous, inanimate form and more as an active material agent. In this book, Kaira M. Cabañas describes how such a shift in conceptions of art’s materiality came to occur, exploring key artistic practices in Venezuela, Brazil, and Western Europe from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Immanent Vitalities expands the discourse of new materialisms by charting how artists, ranging from Gego to Laura Lima, distance themselves from dualisms such as mind-matter, culture-nature, human-nonhuman, and even Western–non-Western in order to impact our understanding of what is animate. Tracing migrations of people, objects, and ideas between South America and Europe, Cabañas historicizes changing perceptions about art’s agency while prompting readers to remain attentive to the ethical dimensions of materiality and of social difference and lived experience.
Between Point Zero and the Iron Curtain
This volume, edited by Éva Forgács, with contributions from art historians from across Europe and the Americas, analyzes the artistic initiatives of the short time span between the end of World War II and the onset of the Cold War. In this moment, a new internationalism was anticipated by retrieving pre-war modernism, as well as creating the new era's new artistic lingua franca. The chapters include in-depth case studies that analyze the complex, often interconnected, projects throughout the world—South America and Eastern and Western Europe—that were soon ended by the Cold War.
Abstraction in Reverse
Introduction: spectatorship after abstract art -- Concrete art, and invention -- Time-objects -- Subjective instability -- The instituting subject -- Conclusion
