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Lot Essay
When Julio Alpuy (Uruguay 1919), one of the outstanding artists of the Taller (workshop-school) founded by Torres-García in 1943 made this wood construction he was twenty-six years old. Today, Construcción de madera is regarded as one of the best and earliest examples of the unique form of modernism that emerged in the Americas.
The irregular frame, similar to the boxes created by Charles G. Shaw in 1936-37, and to Louise Nevelson's first wood relief compositions done around 1944 in the United States, can also be associated to the irregular frames of the Argentine Madí group. However, unlike the Madí group, the Taller artists found pure abstraction limiting. For them figuration didn't necessarily mean that a work was not abstract, as long as it consisted of absolute plastic values, existing in and of themselves.
The originality of this work, painted using a restricted palette of seven colors (an exercise of controlled color that Torres-García urged his students to master), lays in the dynamic synthesis of a constructivist structure coupled with elements of urban life. Ordered inside its compartments are high-rise buildings, a clock, passengers in a bus, a billboard, all icons of the modern world.
The irregular frame, similar to the boxes created by Charles G. Shaw in 1936-37, and to Louise Nevelson's first wood relief compositions done around 1944 in the United States, can also be associated to the irregular frames of the Argentine Madí group. However, unlike the Madí group, the Taller artists found pure abstraction limiting. For them figuration didn't necessarily mean that a work was not abstract, as long as it consisted of absolute plastic values, existing in and of themselves.
The originality of this work, painted using a restricted palette of seven colors (an exercise of controlled color that Torres-García urged his students to master), lays in the dynamic synthesis of a constructivist structure coupled with elements of urban life. Ordered inside its compartments are high-rise buildings, a clock, passengers in a bus, a billboard, all icons of the modern world.