Cecilia de Torres, Ltd.

Line - Plane - Volume / Sculpture: 1944-2006 2006 Winter



Line  - Plane - Volume / Sculpture: 1944-2006

This exhibition of modern and contemporary sculpture shows the infinite reach of this art form.
Artists attuned to the intrinsic nature of each material, whether wood, sheet metal and wire, cement, clay, or acrylic created a new formal and eclectic vocabulary. In several sculptures a dialogue with painting is evident, as those artists are/were also painters.

Monumento, a 1944 wood assemblage by Joaquín Torres-García (Uruguay 1874-1949) is the earliest work presented. In his search for a timeless expression, Torres-García emulated the first human assertive material gesture: to erect a menhir. Torres-Garcia intended to erect large-scale landmarks like Monumento throughout Uruguay, "to familiarize people with geometry, and through geometry with universal art."

Illustrated in his 1944 tome "Universalismo Constructivo,"Monumento, made of Lapacho, a South American hardwood, holds the summation of Torres-García's ideas. The irregular rectangular parts are joined as if stone blocks, reminiscent of Andean wall construction. The carved inscriptions: "Forma,""Abstracto,""Concreto,"and the triangle and the pictographic image of a sun condense his basic beliefs in art.

Francisco Matto (Uruguay 1911-1995) was a painter who shared Torres-García's interest in Amerindian cultures. In 1932, he traveled to Southern Argentina and Chile where he encountered the art of the Araucano and Mapuche Indians. The wood funerary posts in Mapuche cemeteries made him aware of the religious and ritualistic functions in tribal art. In his studio surrounded by his extensive collection of tribal art, Matto sought to infuse his own work with the magic he found in their art – it became his lifelong quest.

The Two Venuses of 1976 hark back to the earliest and most basic representations of the female goddess. Delicately painted, Matto's characteristic light brushstrokes skim the unfinished wood surface. These Venus are thoroughly modern and yet timeless; as the writer Robert C. Morgan so well described: "Like some African carvings, Matto understood the essential, the symbolic, and the emotional infrastructure that informed the space, the elegant maneuvering of space in relation to planar form. The subtle application of color in these works is as poignant as in many of the sculptures of David Smith."

Horacio Torres' (Italy 1924-New York 1976) nudes are in the collection of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts among others, but the wood, wire and fake fur sculpture in this exhibition is an experiment in conceptual art, far from the painting medium where he excelled.

Puzzled by the total faith that tribal societies have in the power of fetishes, the series of artefacts Torres made in the late 1960s were an exploration of the animistic qualities of objects. The totem- box like work has a narrow and dark opening into a cavity that is lined with unseen dark fur and from where a loose electrical wire can be glimpsed. Torres' modern fetishes were plugged into a live outlet and the viewer, invited to insert a hand, ran a real risk of being shocked. Trepidatious as with approaching ancient Rome's Boca de la veritá and concentrating on the wire, the hands unexpected contact with the unidentified fur is jerked away.

José Gurvich (Lithuania 1927-New York 1974) was another extraordinary painter who studied with Torres-García in his Montevideo workshop. As early as 1950 he worked with clay and he continued to do so finding ceramic studios in Rome, Israel, Montevideo and New York.

For Gurvich it was an ideal medium, for in its ductile quality he found immediacy for his expression. Out of a rolled piece of clay, his agile hands created fantastical shapes like the schematized figure on exhibit. Made in New York in the early 1970s, it combines delicate coils in intricate designs. Gurvich's skill as a miniaturist, translated the delicacy of his paintings and drawings into clay.

Gonzalo Fonseca (Uruguay 1922-Italy 1997) another member of the Taller Torres-García in Montevideo, was a brilliant painter, draftsman, and sculptor who worked with wood, cement, stone, clay, and marble. He completed important large public sculpture commissions in Reston Virginia, Mexico City, Tokyo, and New York.

Heads, 1968, is made of construction-wood planks that the artist found on the streets of New York, where he had settled a decade earlier. Nestled within the two boxes are two busts. Concealed behind one face-shaped hinged cover is a carved head choked by a ball stuffed in its mouth, and in the other, a playful reference to sex. This animistic composition confronts and surprises the viewer with an unexpected turn. Painted in chalk like white, earth red, and cobalt blue, within the context of Fonseca's output, Heads is an unusual piece.

Lidya Buzio's (Uruguay 1949) sculptural ceramics combine sculptural form and painting through her unique vision and talent. Formed of thin slabs of red clay through a careful process, the shape is dried, sanded, and painted with colours the artist mixes. As with the 2003 volumetric Cityscape II, the sculptures are then burnished and fired, and through the process the colour fuses with the clay resulting in a smooth, refined and rich surface.

For Robert C. Morgan, writing in American Ceramics, Buzio is "intent on giving the illusion of bulging, bending prostheses that go over and through convex and concave surfaces into some strange, enigmatic architecture.""The rhythms are most astounding. To see convincing replicas of archetypical buildings from a New York cityscape fully absorbed into the surface of a vessel where the eye forces the mind to move back and forth relentlessly between two and three dimensions is an inexorable experience."Buzio's sculptural ceramics are in the collections of important American and international museums worldwide.

When Julio Alpuy (Uruguay, 1919) settled in New York in 1961, he was conflicted by his earlier work. Painting, he said, kept pulling him back to what he had already done. His solution was to change the medium; it was then that he concentrated on working with wood. Alpuy, like Louise Nevelson, found in their downtown Manhattan neighbourhood ample discarded wood to make sculptures and like her, he hoarded it.

Formed from a chunk of wood beam, the 1989 sculpture Los Arquetipos (Archetypes), relates as the name suggests to a first form - an embryonic state: created by carved shapes like a female torso and tender plants. At top there is a bird-like carving, emerging from a nesting grove into its first flight, a flower bud, and a vessel-like shape. Alpuy's love for the organic and the primal, for the source of life, are presented in this piece in a balanced play of volumes. Concave and convex, the wood has been caressed into delicate lines, pierced, and carved to simulate deep crevasses that burrow into the depth of the earth from where all life emerges.

When in 1991, César Paternosto (Argentina 1931) was awarded the Rockefeller Foundation's Artist-in-Residency at the Lago di Como-Bellagio Study Center, he worked on a group of wood models for sculptures. Two years later he made his first sculptures of pigmented cement. "At this point," Paternosto wrote, "I decided that casting cement, a technique that I had learned long ago, was more feasible than carving stones."

Paternosto relates these sculptures (evident in the elegant vertical open accents in Impossible Seat, 1993) to a previous series of canvases titled Porticos. These door and window-like openings refer to the Andean or Greek "sun gates" and to the symbolic architecture of antiquity - where "the openings were metaphors for the transition from sacred to profane space."

Carlos Bevilacqua (Brazil 1965) studied architecture in Rio de Janeiro and in 1991-93, drawing and sculpture in New York at the New York Studio School. His whimsical work arrived from Rio in parts: lengths of wire, wire springs, glass beads, wood rods and spheres that we assembled - following his instructions. . It was an enlightening process through which one learned to appreciate how the various elements of the piece relate and connect to each other in a harmonious whole, either by fitting or by the tension of the springs.

Ladd Spiegel (United States 1952) Double Cube, 2006 has a tight cluster of pegs inserted on a square outline on a square base, Malevich's archetypal Suprematist icon, is repeated in space. This piece represents two cubes, one defined by the white-painted portions of the extended elements, and the other by the unpainted parts. The eye is challenged to create the cubic shapes from the chaotic forms.

As Jennifer Liese wrote "Spiegel's wood squares bring the Agnes Martinesque grid -customarily reserved for distanced contemplation of the sublime- right down to earth. Studded with hand-whittled pegs, the work invites us, if only by suggestion, to touch the sacred symbol and partake in our own meditation." The hand-carving of the 81 pegs is a Zen-like process for the artist, because the repetitive action creates a meditative state.

Alicia Penalba (Argentina 1918-France 1982) moved to Paris when in 1948 she was awarded a scholarship by the French Government. She studied with Ossip Zadkine at La Grand Chaumière academy, and in 1955 showed her work at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, her first solo exhibition was in Paris at the Galerie du Dragon. She was awarded the International Prize for Sculpture at the São Paulo Bienale in 1961. Her sculptures range from the monumental, as “La Grande Double”1972, a massive bronze at the Mortgage Guarantee Insurance Company Plaza in Milwaukee to gold jewelry.

Composition, of polished pewter, consists of container like elements suggestive of exotic, petrified, sea life forms, arranged in an asymmetrical, organic manner. Penalba was "moved by a need to spiritualize the symbols of eroticism which is the source of all creation and the purest and most sacred state in the life of a man." Composition, signed on the underside and with stamped initials and the number 21, was previously in the collection of the Rothschild family.

One of the most distinguished Argentine abstract sculptors, Ennio Iommi (Argentina, 1926), was a co-founder of Arte Concreto Invención in Buenos Aires, that was to become one of the most innovative avant-garde movements of the Rio de la Plata in the 1940s. Among many other projects, his large sculpture for Le Corbusier's Casa Curuchet in Buenos Aires is renowned. Iommi's Untitled 1949, in our exhibition, is an important example of a series of airy compositions the sculptor began in 1946 entitled Interrupted Continuity.

León Ferrari (Argentina, 1920) proposes a "written visual art" which substitutes image and figuration for a text description of his work. A notable example is his Cuadro Escrito [Written Painting] , 1964, as described by the artist; it is "a totally literary piece.” Ferrari maintains that the relevance of the rectangular shape of the sheet of paper, is often overlooked, "Every single page man has written is homage to the rectangle." The rectangular drawing on a sheet of paper, he adds, can also be repeated in the air, and "when projected into space becomes a prism whose faces and edges are the anonymous frame, repeated, impersonal, transparent, envelope within which a line simply has to find its place."

The Untitled small stainless steel piece, dated 1978, is made of thin vertical rods attached to a metal grid at the base. It is a precursor of the large "artifacts for drawing sounds," which Ferrari showed in 1980 in Sâo Paulo. Made of metal rods these sculptures can be 'played' as musical instruments. The motion of the wires, when either stirred by the wind or by the human hand, in their wave-like infinite configurations, inspired a series of 1979 drawings that depict the wires frozen in different movements, Ferrari titled them Vocabularies.

Ferrari's "January 5, 2006," is a hanging piece composed of thin wood rods attached by wire. Viewed from different angles, the triangles superimposing on each other create an intricate interplay of lines. It is an elegant drawing projected in space.

The triangles in Ferrari's piece resonate with the triangular planes in Lygia Clark’s (Brazil 1920-1988) Bicho [Critter], 1960. Clark was one of the outstanding artists of the Brazilian Neo-Concreto group. As the title implies, Clark conceived her hinged sculpture of geometric planes in metal as a living organism, she wrote how the hinges that connect the planes "made me think of a dorsal spine."

She emphasized their organic quality by enabling the viewer to manipulate the Bichos into different shapes. When asked into how many positions the Bicho can change, she replied: "I have no idea, nor do you, but the Bicho knows," as if it had an independent life of its own. The Bicho in our exhibition was shown in Lygia Clark's first New York exhibition at the Louis Alexander Gallery in 1963.

Marta Chilindron's (Argentina 1951) sculptures made of transparent acrylic, sometimes tinted, frequently more visible through shadow than matter, are of such lightness that one begins to ponder - the object's very existence.

Her folding sculptures invite the active participation of the spectator - to exist as such - they collapse, making the physical perception of space a factor subordinated to their conceptual discernment, to process, and somehow to enchantment. Constantly folding and unfolding, always in the process of existing and disappearing, Chilindron's translucent sculptures approach the ephemeral.



Joaquín Torres-García

Joaquín Torres-García 1874 - 1949

On April 30, 1934, when he arrived in Montevideo after forty-three years of absence, Torres-García told the press that he had returned to Uruguay in order to "develop a wide range of activities, to lecture, to teach courses, to achieve... on walls what I have already achieved on canvas,... to create in Montevideo a movement that will surpass the art of Paris."

"... the moral zeal and joy in art making that Torres-García inculcated in his students, gives evidence of what a vibrant creation Latin American modernism was. It was technically at least as accomplished as its counterpart in the pre-Abstract Expressionist New York of the 30's and 40's, but improved upon it in one crucial respect: it transformed a borrowed European style into one deeply expressive of a New World culture. By Torres-García's standards, the work produced by El Taller was the genuine utopian article, and for anyone interested in modernism today, it is certainly an art to be reckoned with."
Holland Cotter, The New York Times, December 4, 1992

Since he had emigrated to Spain before his seventeenth birthday, he had no family ties in his native country. Nevertheless, Torres' declarations revealed a clear and ambitious plan. This was no passing visit; there was something definitive in his words that indicated that his return had been a deliberate act.

After a long development, during which his painting evolved from the Mediterranean classicism of his Barcelona frescoes of 1913 and passed through periods of Vibrationism, Cubism, and Fauvism, it culminated in 1929 in what was to become his characteristic incorporation of symbols into a geometric grid based on the golden section.

For Torres-García, the symbol was a way of synthesizing idea and form while bypassing narrative, which would interfere with the unity of the work. He called this conjunction of idea and form the nexus between the vital (or living) and the abstract. By inserting a symbol representing humanistic values into the antithetical rational structure of neoplasticism (which was devoid of human references), Torres succeeded in creating a style that constituted a major contribution to modern art. He called it Constructive Universalism.

What Torres-García envisioned as the new art for the Americas would encompass all expressions from architecture to the most humble utilitarian object. This was not an American version of the Russian constructivist movement or the Bauhaus; his aim was to create a modern art for the new continent equal in scope to the art of the greatest civilizations of antiquity. The uniqueness of Torres' proposal consisted of his incorporation of essential elements of indigenous American art into the basic principles of European constructivism and geometric abstraction.

His conception of art had a metaphysical and spiritual dimension - a faith in the spiritual value of art as a creative act bound to a universal law - and - in the independent existence of a work of art, apart from its naturalistic contents.

[Excerpted from the essay by Cecilia de Torres in El Taller Torres-García, The School of the South and Its Legacy, University of Texas Press, 1992.]


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Lidya Buzio

Sculptor of painted surfaces, for over thirty years Buzio has created abstract volumes and cityscapes.  Working conceptually she creates the sculptural form that best address the tonal coloring or landscape that she will paint.  Buzio’s ceramic sculptures twist and juxtapose the structure and light of New York.

Buzio’s work is in the Painting & Sculpture Collections of the Brooklyn Museum & the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston; in the Smithsonian National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Fine Arts Museums; Nelson-Atkins; Everson; Victoria & Albert, London; Taiwan National Museum; and many other museums and private collections, internationally.

A catalogue of her work with an essay by Garth Clark and an extensive chronology is in preparation.


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Julio Alpuy

American, born in Tacuarembó, Uruguay, 1919.  Lived in New York City from 1961 until his death in 2009.

Introduced to Joaquín Torres-García in 1940, Alpuy joined his atelier and in 1943, began teaching at the TTG under Torres-García’s direction.  In 1944, Alpuy painted two Constructivist Murals for the Saint Bois Hospital, one now at the College of Architecture.  In 1949, he executed several mural commissions in mosaic for the architects Leborgne and De Leone and for Torres-García’s home.  In 1950s, interspersed by trips to Europe, the Middle East and Chile, and two years in Bogotá and Caracas, Alpuy continued to teach at the El Taller and work professionally.  He executed a series of large mural paintings for the architect Payssé Reyes, the Larrañaga Lyceum and for the YMCA headquarters in Montevideo. 

In 1961, Alpuy immigrated to New York City, where he died in 2009. He received a 1961 Fellowship from The New School for Social Research.  Alpuy was awarded a mural commission for the new Uruguayan Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1980, and received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1983), the New York Council for the Arts (1986), and the Gottlieb Foundation (1990).  Alpuy has had numerous one-person exhibitions and participated in numerous group shows for nearly sixty years.  In 1999, the Municipal government in Montevideo honored Alpuy with a retrospective exhibition that then traveled to Buenos Aires.  Alpuy’s work is in major public and private collections internationally.


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Gonzalo Fonseca

Born in Montevideo in 1922, Fonseca traveled frequently to Europe with his family visiting museums and archeological sites that made a great impression on him.  At 15, he learned to sculpt in stone.  In 1939, Fonseca enrolled in the College of Architecture of Montevideo, but by 1942, he abandoned his architectural studies and joined the Taller Torres-García.  Along with Jonio Montiel, Sergio de Castro and Julio Alpuy in 1945, he traveled through Argentina, Peru and Bolivia to study pre-Columbian art.  In 1950, Fonseca moved to Paris, then Rome in 1951.  He traveled through North Africa and the Middle East where he joined in excavations directed by Petrie Flinters.  Living in Madrid in 1953, Fonseca studied ceramics at Rosedal - La Moncloa and met the Spanish sculptor Jorge de Oteiza.  In 1956, he returned to Montevideo and in 1958, moved to New York.  In 1970, Fonseca began working in Italy, near Carrara, on large marble pieces.  Fonseca lived and worked in New York and Seravezza, Italy.  He died in Italy, June 11, 1997.


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Marta Chilindron

Chilindron was born in Argentina and raised in Uruguay, in 1969 she moved to New York where she received a BFA from the State University of New York.

Since the beginning of her career, Chilindron has focused on issues of space, time, and perspective. In her early sculpture she altered the shape of basic furniture to reflect her point of view in relation to her body in real space. In her first solo show in the Gallery in 1997, Chilindron further explored the treatment of furniture by compressing the depth of the stylized shapes of a table, a chair and a sideboard made of white enameled wood, while leaving the height and width untouched. Her first collapsible piece, made in 1998, was of a table and chair, cut out of Gatorboard that materialize in the third dimension when opened. Cinema Kinesis was her first large moving work, commissioned by El Museo del Barrio in 1999, of a movie theatre that opened and collapsed powered by a motor. In 2000 she started working with transparent and color acrylics.

She was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, the Anonymous Was a Woman prize, a Joan Mitchell Award, and a Civitella Ranieri Artist Residency in Umbria, Italy. Invited to participate in many group shows: Exit Art-New York, CIFO-Miami, MoLAA-Long Beach, Haus Konstruktif-Zurich; and solo shows in Doha, Quatar, Geneva, Miami, and Sâo Paulo. Her last public installation was for the Focus Lodz Biennal in Poland.


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José Gurvich

Born in Lithuania, 1927; died in New York, 1974.

A violin student along with Horacio, the younger son of Torres-García, Gurvich studied with Torres-García and was a part of the Taller Torres-García until 1962. He spent several years on an Israeli kibbutz and traveled in France and Italy before settling in New York in 1970. Gurvich achieved a unique style as well as technical mastery. His work is populated with figures and images that combine the iconography of his Jewish upbringing, the formative years with Torres-García, his great admiration for Breughel and Bosch and a life spent in Montevideo, Israel and New York.


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Francisco Matto

Born 1911 and died 1995 in Montevideo, Uruguay

Privately tutored and a child painter, Matto at age 21, traveled to Tierra del Fuego and acquired the first Pre-Columbian pieces of what was to become a major collection and an important influence on his art. Matto met Torres-García in 1939, joining his atelier and exhibiting with the artists of the Taller Torres-García until the 1960s. An elegant, aristocratic man, Matto worked with humble materials, preferring cardboard to canvas and found pieces of wood for his sculptures. His work has been exhibited at the Sálon des Surindépendants, Paris; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; in Spain, Italy, Germany, Moscow, Tokyo, New York and throughout Latin America. Matto's monumental concrete sculptures are landmarks in Punta del Este, Uruguay.


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León Ferrari

León Ferrari was born in Buenos Aires, 1920. He was awarded the 2007 Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale. Ferrari is a multi-faceted artist of great technical skill and conceptual prowess. Recent years have brought him great regard from the international art community and prices for his work have soared.

“León Ferrari’s vibrant and challenging work is conversant with poetry, explores enigmas and metaphors, comments on space and form, creates music, can depict improbable cities and impugn religious and military institutions that monopolize ‘the revealed truth.’

“Ferrari’s reputation and international recognition began less than ten years ago when his work was included in the 2000-survey exhibition ‘Heterotopias’ at the Centro Reina Sofía in Madrid, and... The national scandal brought on by attempts to censure his retrospective exhibition at the Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires in 2004, ...

“Today, his ink drawings, collages, sculptures, heliographies, Braille-embossed photographs, objects and installations are all critically acclaimed and in worldwide demand. Ferrari is still active, sharp, working daily and enjoying a fertile creative period as well as experiencing great personal success.”

Victoria Verlichak, 2007, from "Serie de Errores & Works 1962-2007"


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Horacio Torres

Of the many painters who studied with his father, the great Constructivist artist Joaquín Torres-García, Horacio Torres made the quantum leap into the Contemporary art world of abstract and expressionistic painters in New York's 1970s. That he did so with figurative canvases was a singular achievement. Taken under the wing of the critic Clement Greenberg, who understood that Horacio's work was really about painting and was thoroughly modern, Horacio explored the thunderous territory of Titian, Velasquez and late Goya with a unique background of skill and aesthetic education in a contemporary way. Thus the series of headless nudes and of figures with faces obscured, make clear his painterly intentions and concerns. His monumental canvases are wondrous exercises of painted imagination formed with the structure of the depicted figure, but they are not about nudes, they are about painting.


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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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