拍品 47

Tonight's lot features a number of representative pieces from what is without a doubt Latin American art's most important contribution to postwar art history: the Concrete and Constructivist artistic production that proliferated in Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela during the forties, fifties and sixties. The history of this contribution has just started to be written, and the picture that emerges is a fragmented field of events which however can be sketched out. In Argentina for example, the immediate influence of European Concrete art, at times mediated through the figure of Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres García, is recognizable. As early as 1944, with the publishing of Arturo, a magazine of poetry and art edited in Buenos Aires, several artists later associated with three groups of geometric abstraction: Arte Concreto Invención, Arte Madi, and Perceptismo, proposed paintings with irregular frames. It was precisely Rhod Rothfuss, whose Acento Rojo from 1957 is part of tonight's sale, who then wrote in the magazine its famous essay: "The frame: a problem in contemporary art." Crucial to understand the Argentine avant-garde's struggle with the fictional space of painting, the essay posed the orthogonal frame as that pictorial element which is fundamental for the illusionistic concept of a window through which the viewer contemplates a fragment of a theme. The only way to avoid this, Rothfuss wrote, is by structuring the frame according to the composition of the painting. Ultimately, the radical experiments that ensued after 1944 delivered objects that stood half-way between painting and sculpture and that fought hard to break free from the straightjacket of representation. The Argentine experiments were known in Brazil but an added layer to this country's reception of geometric abstraction was provided by the triumph of Swiss Concretism, specially the work of Max Bill, in the Sáo Paulo Biennial of 1951. Two important groups of geometric abstraction emerged in the aftermath of the 1951 Biennial: the Grupo Frente from Sáo Paulo, and the Grupo Ruptura from Rio de Janeiro. Artists Lygia Clark and Hilio Oiticica were both part of the Grupo Frente but their reaction against mechanistic geometric abstraction led them, along with other artists united under the Neoconcrete banner, to move away from the self-containment and rigidness of the conventional Concrete object. In this sense, Oiticica's Parangolés, initiated in 1964, developed out of a dialogue with color and was shaped in the manner of capes, tents and banners, at times featuring text and photographs, that could be worn by others in movement. Movement became also crucial for artists such as Venezuelan Jesús Rafael Soto and Argentinean Julio Le Parc, both of whom became part of the Kinetic art movement that emerged in Paris around the figure of dealer Denise Reni. While in works by Le Parc movement is triggered by a motor or simply by air, in many of Soto's works, a vibration is produced by the minute perceptual changes of position of its plastic elements due to the tilting of the head or the side to side movement of the viewer. Other artists such as Brazilians Sergio Camargo and Mira Schendel tried to activate the surface of their works with more subtle procedures that the ones used by Kinetic artists. The magnificent triptych made in 1969 by Sergio Camargo on auction tonight is predicated on the dynamic dispersal of the pictorial surface through wood protrusions that make the paintings explode into real space. Schendel, a Swiss emigrie in Brazil, who arrived in that country in 1949, developed a fragile body of work that explored the void, the empty space of the page upon which she inscribed her mundane lines. The Monotypes, exemplified by the Untitled piece shown here, were produced between 1964 and 1966 in approximately two thousand drawings of small format made on rice paper. More recent approaches towards art making represented in tonight's lot combine the subtlety of Schendel's mark making and the concerns with real space developed in the radical work of Oiticica. Colombian artist Doris Salcedo's investigations into the structures of collective memory use furniture and personal belongings, and through delicate and laborious changes of surface, alter our common perception of everyday objects. And in a way so same time they put on hold the alleged truthfulness of photography to make us wonder what there is beneath it, or if there is something beneath it. They pose questions about representation, about art, about artifice, and yes, in times of uncertainty, about reality too. Mónica Amor October 4, 2001

Jesús Rafael Soto (b. 1923)

Columna rosa

細節

Jesús Rafael Soto (b. 1923)
Columna rosa
painted wood construction with metal and nylon attachments
79½ x 85½in. (202 x 217.2cm.)
Executed in 1973

來源

Charles Cowles Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner.

展覽

Paris, Jesús Rafael Soto, Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Jan. 7-March 9, 1997, p. 135, n.n. (illustrated in color)