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Waltercio Caldas (born 1946) is one of Brazil's most recognized and respected contemporary artists. He occupies a key role in the generation that bridges the historical innovations of the Concrete and Neo-Concrete artists of the 1950 and '60s and today's younger artists. In this ninth volume of the Conversacionesseries, writer, curator and art historian Ariel Jiménez engages Caldas in a lively dialogue covering more than five decades of artistic production, exploring the connections between perception and history, and the way in which artist, viewer, context and history all play roles in how art is seen and experienced. Combining a formal intelligence, eclectic materials and provocative games, Caldas' works raise subtle questions about the unique nature of art and its place in a world of redundancy.
This book is the result of decades of conversations between curator Ariel Jiménez and the Venezuelan kinetic artist Carlos Cruz-Diez. Their discussions provide compelling insights into Cruz-Diez's lifelong search to dematerialize color.
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.
Introduction: spectatorship after abstract art -- Concrete art, and invention -- Time-objects -- Subjective instability -- The instituting subject -- Conclusion
"Beginning with the oil blowout in 1922 that is considered the moment that marked Venezuela's entry into a 'modern' era, Refined Material explores the integral relationship between Venezuelan oil industry and artistic production. In this groundbreaking study, Sean Nesselrode Moncada examines Venezuela's mid-century art and architecture in an argument that reinforces the inextricability of the rise of a capitalist and centralized state from life, activism, and art. Oil provided the crucible for national reinvention, ushering in a period of dizzying optimism and bitter disillusion as artists, architects, graphic designers, activists, and critics sought to define the terms of modernity. Looking at five different but interrelated case studies--a print magazine, a planned housing community, a luxury hotel, a kinetic museum installation, and a documentary film--this book brings forth a novel reading to the renowned Venezuelan modernist canon and reveals how the logic of refinement conditioned the terms of development and redefined our relationship to nature, matter, and one another"--
Venezuela's primary exponent of Kinetic and Op art, Jesús Soto (1923-2005) is one of the most important Latin American artists of the twentieth century. Here, in conversations with Ariel Jiménez, Soto recounts his childhood in Ciudad Bolivar, Venezuela; his first encounters with painting; his unending search for "thinking" time and space as dimensions beyond pictorial representation; and the development of his ideas that finally lead him to the creation of his famous Penetrables, large kinetic sculptures through which the viewer walks. This volume is a revised and expanded edition of Conversaciones con Jesús Soto (2001), which served as the inspiration for the Fundación Cisneros' Conversaciones/ Conversations series.
Going beyond current readings of Concretism and Neoconcretism, this book shows how these movements were bred in the Brazilian circuit, after adapting international constructivism to the cultural conditions of the country. Thus, based on a systematic investigation in the archives of newspapers of that period, this book explores the premises through which Neoconcretism became organized and gained momentum in a series of debates between the avant-gardes of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro—debates that focused on the visual arts and poetry as objects of intense aesthetic experimentation and prospective transformation. They offer a guide through what seems to be a maze of contradictory theories an...
This text examines the collection of feminist art in the Museum of Modern Art. It features essays presenting a range of generational and cultural perspectives.
Art produced outside hegemonic centers is often seen as a form of derivation or relegated to a provisional status. Forming Abstraction turns this narrative on its head. In the first book-length study of postwar Brazilian art and culture, Adele Nelson highlights the importance of exhibitionary and pedagogical institutions in the development of abstract art in Brazil. By focusing on the formation of the São Paulo Biennial in 1951; the early activities of artists Geraldo de Barros, Lygia Clark, Waldemar Cordeiro, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, and Ivan Serpa; and the ideas of critics like Mário Pedrosa, Nelson illuminates the complex, strategic processes of citation and adaption of both local and international forms. The book ultimately demonstrates that Brazilian art institutions and abstract artistic groups—and their exhibitions of abstract art in particular—served as crucial loci for the articulation of societal identities in a newly democratic nation at the onset of the Cold War.