César Paternosto - WHITE/RED 2001 Autumn

César Paternosto - WHITE/RED

Celebrating the publication of WHITE/RED: César Paternosto, Cecilia de Torres, Ltd. is pleased to present a selection of his work at the gallery.

Born in Argentina in 1931, César Paternosto has exhibited widely in Latin America and abroad. Since 1967, he has worked in New York as a painter, sculptor, author and curator. His works are included in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City; Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, N.Y.; Menil Collection, Houston, Texas; 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, which is available through our site. Paternosto's exploration of Amerindian abstraction has fueled his artistic work of the last twenty years.

In 1998, César Paternosto curated for Cecilia de Torres, Ltd. the ground breaking exhibition with 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, that is currently on view at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels and that will re-open in October in Valencia, Spain at the IVAM 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 the present, will be exhibited at the Drawing Center in New York, and in a comparative overview of work from the late-sixties to the mid-seventies, Paternosto and the Brazilian neo-concretist Willys de Castro will be featured in the exhibition: Literally Lateral, at New York's Americas Society.

César Paternosto

b. 1931 La Plata, Argentina – lives in Segovia, Spain

Around 1957, César Paternosto started creating artworks based on Geometric Abstraction. After attending a serial music concert, he was enthralled by Anton Webern's pregnant silences, which influenced the next development in his art. By the end of the 1960s, Paternosto moved the emphasis of depicted matter in his paintings to the outer-sides of the canvas, leaving the front blank. By shifting the attention to the sides, he was questioning the traditional viewing of paintings frontally, and as the range of the pictorial field was expanded to the sides, the three dimensionality of the painting turned it into an object. His 2012 essay, “Painting as Object: Geometric Forms and Lateral Expansions,” explained the evolution and continuity of his idea, from the early lateral vision canvases, to his most recent work.
In 1977, Paternosto began to travel to Bolivia and Peru to study the archaeological sites Tiwanaku, Ollantaytambo, and Machu Picchu. These trips marked an important turning point in his work sparking new formal explorations in form, composition, and color. By rooting his art in American autochthonous traditions rather than in the modern European model, Paternosto created a new and original type of abstraction based on the centuries-old woven textiles and sculptural stones of the Inca.
Paintings by Paternosto are found in various prestigious collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; the Kunstmuseum, Bern, Switzerland; and the Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany, amongst others.

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