Cecilia de Torres, Ltd.

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César Paternosto



Born in Argentina in 1931, César Paternosto has exhibited widely internationally.  From 1967 to 2005, he worked in New York as a painter, sculptor, author and curator.  His works are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City; Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, N.Y.; Menil Collection, Houston, Texas; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Kunstmuseum, Bern, Switzerland; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, Argentina; among many others.

Since he began working as an artist in the early 1960s, César Paternosto has been in the vanguard of abstraction in Latin America.  An expert on the symbolic systems of Pre-Columbian civilizations, Paternosto has used his own photography and drawings to document and analyze the ancient remains of the region.  This research was published in The Stone and The Thread - Andean Roots of Abstract Art, University of Texas Press in 1996. Paternosto's exploration of Amerindian abstraction fueled his artistic work over thirty years.

In 1998, César Paternosto curated for Cecilia de Torres, Ltd. the ground breaking exhibition and catalogue: North and South Connected: An Abstraction of The Americas, which explored abstraction in Amerindian art and chronicled its influence on 20th Century artists (Albers, Gottlieb, Nevelson, Torres-García, etc.).  That exhibition was expanded by Paternosto into the major survey, Abstraction: The Amerindian Paradigm, for the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels and that traveled to the IVAM in Valencia, Spain, with over 160 works of modern art and ancient textiles, ceramics and objects.

In the spring of 2002, Paternosto's works on paper, from the 1960s to then, were exhibited at the Drawing Center in New York.  In 2004, he had a retrospective at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente, in Segovia, Spain where he moved in 2005. 

The 2007 exhibition High Times Hard Times New York Painting 1967-1975, included his 1969 side-painted work ElSur.  Paternosto’s 2006 three-panel Ritmos Verticales II, was part of the Smithsonian Institute’s Southern Identity – Contemporary Argentine Art exhibition in Washington in 2010.

In 2010, the Spanish architect Rafael Moneo commissioned Paternosto for a pictorial intervention to the new arrivals hall of Atocha, the main rail station in Madrid.  The result echoes Paternosto’s side-painted canvases across a 170-foot span of steel.


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White/Red

White/Red

This beautifully designed and printed catalogue of essays, large color plates, and illustrated chronology explores Paternosto's artistic contributions, influences and achievements over the last 4 decades.

Essays by Lucy R. Lippard, Ricardo Martín-Crosa & Toshiaki Minemura; printed on Fabriano paper by Lucini officina d'arte graffica, Milano, Italy; Hardcover, 24 color, 56 b&w illustrations, 144 pages

$35.00 + postage

The Stone and the Thread: Andean Roots of Abstract Art

The Stone and the Thread: Andean Roots of Abstract Art

Challenging the notion that abstraction is a development of the modern West, Paternosto reveals its deep roots as an indigenous American tradition and shows how that tradition reverberates in the work of twentieth-century artists... In this major, paradigm-shifting book... César Paternosto offers the first comprehensive analysis of ancient Andean art - textiles, pottery, stone sculpture, and the famous lines in the Nazca desert - into one coherent whole...

César Paternosto; 272 pages; In English, University of Texas Press, hardcover, 172 photographs and illustrations

$ 35.00 + postage

North and South Connected: An Abstraction of the Americas

North and South Connected: An Abstraction of the Americas

Catalogue of the 1998-99 gallery exhibition with a major essay by the artist and historian César Paternosto and the essay: Three Andean Tunics – Color and Geometry as Metaphor by Vanessa Drake & Andres Moraga. As reviewed by Holland Cotter in the New York Times, "... the show traces a line, or rather several lines, between pre-Columbian art and 20th-century American modernism, with some eye-opening results."

Cecilia de Torres, Ltd. 52 pages, 16 color plates, 42 black and white illustrations

$ 20.00 + postage