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Lot Essay
Fonseca was one of the original members of the Taller Torres-García, a workshop established in 1944 by the Uruguayan master Joaquín Torres-García as part of a broad program of modern arts education in Montevideo. A student of Torres-García from 1942 to 1949, Fonseca shared his teacher’s conception of an abstract art based on universal symbols. During this formative period, Fonseca assimilated the Constructivist tradition of abstraction with his study of pre-Hispanic ruins in Bolivia and Peru, later supplemented by travel to archaeological sites in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Fonseca settled in New York in 1958 and embarked upon numerous large-scale public works, among them a group of monumental sculptures in Reston, Virginia (1965); a concrete tower in Mexico City on the occasion of the Olympic Games (1967); and the present assemblage for Alza Laboratory. His work is included in major public collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Fonseca represented Uruguay at the 44th Venice Biennale in 1990.
Fonseca’s interest in what curator Mari Carmen Ramírez has called a “myth of origins” intensified upon his arrival in New York. The recovery of pre-Columbian sources in sculpture, to which Fonseca devoted himself exclusively after 1964, developed through his exploration of architectonic space in the cavities of found pieces of stone, whose built surfaces recall the hybrid escultoarquitecturas of ancient civilizations. “Their structure represents a hybrid fusion of forms and elements from the monumental art of ancient civilizations,” Ramírez observes, but their classicizing aesthetic also points to secondary sources in classical and Renaissance traditions of carved sculpture. During his New York years, Fonseca split his time between Manhattan and his studio in Italy, where he worked on pieces of stone found in an abandoned marble quarry. “In describing the creative process involved in the production of his sculptures, Fonseca speaks of how the stone itself suggests the theme and the artist only uncovers what is already there,” Ramírez notes. “In spite of the fact that he carves directly into the stone block, he ends by consciously removing the evidence of his hand from the creative process and thus achieving for the work the overall effect of a self-contained unit or microcosm that has survived from a remote past” (“Re-positioning the South: The Legacy of El Taller Torres-García in Contemporary Latin American Art,” El Taller Torres-García: The School of the South and its Legacy, exh. cat., The Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, Austin, 1992, pp. 264-65).
This dialogue between the prehistoric origins of civilization and the classical and modern languages of sculpture is sustained across the geometric forms and cut-outs that constitute Seven Marble Piece Assemblage. Fonseca respects the integrity of the white marble, left largely in its natural state and only partially worked; volumes jut outward and upward, the objects and niches thoughtfully integrated within the architectural whole. Suggestively surreal, the assemblage evokes the ruins of a distant, prehistoric past through monolithic forms and the abstraction of primary shapes—cubic, pyramidal, ovoid—that emerge within and across its structure.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
Fonseca’s interest in what curator Mari Carmen Ramírez has called a “myth of origins” intensified upon his arrival in New York. The recovery of pre-Columbian sources in sculpture, to which Fonseca devoted himself exclusively after 1964, developed through his exploration of architectonic space in the cavities of found pieces of stone, whose built surfaces recall the hybrid escultoarquitecturas of ancient civilizations. “Their structure represents a hybrid fusion of forms and elements from the monumental art of ancient civilizations,” Ramírez observes, but their classicizing aesthetic also points to secondary sources in classical and Renaissance traditions of carved sculpture. During his New York years, Fonseca split his time between Manhattan and his studio in Italy, where he worked on pieces of stone found in an abandoned marble quarry. “In describing the creative process involved in the production of his sculptures, Fonseca speaks of how the stone itself suggests the theme and the artist only uncovers what is already there,” Ramírez notes. “In spite of the fact that he carves directly into the stone block, he ends by consciously removing the evidence of his hand from the creative process and thus achieving for the work the overall effect of a self-contained unit or microcosm that has survived from a remote past” (“Re-positioning the South: The Legacy of El Taller Torres-García in Contemporary Latin American Art,” El Taller Torres-García: The School of the South and its Legacy, exh. cat., The Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, Austin, 1992, pp. 264-65).
This dialogue between the prehistoric origins of civilization and the classical and modern languages of sculpture is sustained across the geometric forms and cut-outs that constitute Seven Marble Piece Assemblage. Fonseca respects the integrity of the white marble, left largely in its natural state and only partially worked; volumes jut outward and upward, the objects and niches thoughtfully integrated within the architectural whole. Suggestively surreal, the assemblage evokes the ruins of a distant, prehistoric past through monolithic forms and the abstraction of primary shapes—cubic, pyramidal, ovoid—that emerge within and across its structure.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park