The Grey Art Gallery Presents:The Geometry of Hope: Latin American Abstract Art From the Patricia Phelps De Cisneros Collection
The Geometry of Hope: Latin American Abstract Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, a major exhibition comprising some 115 works of art from the acclaimed Venezuela-based collection, is now on view through December 8 at the Grey Art Gallery. The show provides a comprehensive scholarly overview of Latin American geometric abstraction from the 1930s to the 1970s, which will be enriched and expanded upon by interdisciplinary public programs taking place throughout NYU and co-sponsored by Grey, including poetry, music, performance, lectures, and panel discussions, in addition to a major symposium.
The Geometry of Hope focuses on key cities in the development of abstraction in the Americas: Montevideo (1930s), Buenos Aires (1940s), São Paulo (1950s), Rio de Janeiro (1950s–60s), Paris (1960s), and Caracas (1960s–70s). In tracing the flow of ideas from one socio-geographic context to another, the exhibition challenges the view of Latin American art as a single phenomenon, revealing important differences and tensions among various artistic proposals articulated during the decades under examination. For example, Joaquín Torres-García’s fusion of ancient American art with neo-plasticism was roundly rejected by the next generation of ardent Marxists in Argentina. And the rational and internationalist aspirations of the São Paulo concretists of the 1950s were reinterpreted and charged with specific Brazilian references by the neoconcretists in Rio de Janeiro. The exhibition’s inclusion of Paris as a “Latin American” city underscores the cosmopolitan and international nature of Latin American abstraction—characteristics that are often ignored in American and European accounts of the history of modern art.
The exhibition includes work by approximately 30 artists. Among them are Joaquín Torres-García, from Montevideo; Alfredo Hlito and Tomás Maldonado, from Buenos Aires; Geraldo de Barros and Waldemar Cordeiro, from São Paulo; Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, from Rio de Janeiro; and Jesús Rafael Soto and Carlos Cruz-Diez, from Paris and Caracas.
The show was organized by the Blanton Museum of Art, at the University of Texas at Austin, where it was seen earlier this year and encompassed some 130 works. The exhibition and its catalogue were the culminating project of the Cisneros Graduate Research Seminar at the University of Texas at Austin, a multi-year scholarly collaboration between the New York- and Caracas-based Cisneros collection and the Blanton, headed by Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, curator of Latin American Art at the Blanton and organizer of the exhibition.
For information on the exhibition and events relating to it, go to www.nyu.edu/greyart.
