Square Roots 2000 Winter
Square Roots: Paul Bowen, Eduardo Costa, Liz Deschenes, César Paternosto, David Cabrera, Marta Chilindron, MP Landis, Ladd Spiegel
Recalling the square, our modern art-historical memory delves back to Mondrian's pilgrimage from nature to the Neoplastic and Malevich's archetypal Suprematist icons. Drifting onward along time's line, we unearth Albers' mid-century series, "Homage to the Square," and a vast sweep of color fields. And in more recent recesses, the mind most likely alights on one or another Minimalist slab. The square - on the surface so very simple, with its four sides of equal length, four angles of equal degree - has served the twentieth century's artists graciously, comprising and conveying manifold meanings just by being its ever-accommodating self.
In its more recent incarnations, this repository, like any malleable entity, has perhaps suffered at the hands of its interpreters. Emerging in the infancy of abstraction as a lofty conduit to metaphysical consciousness, a cipher of the fourth dimension, the square becomes, by the 1960s, an emblem of the prefabricated industrial object, a cold symbol of Carl Andre's "significant blankness," a tabula rasa forbidden inscription. What woeful injustice for the shape the ancients imbued with the power to fend off plagues, the shape from which the logarithmic spiral of shells and celestial nebulae springs, the shape that, given three dimensions, promised protection from a deluge of evils, until Pandora lost her will.
It is a vital pleasure, then, to find the square, of late stripped bare, redeemed in "Square Roots," an exhibition of painting and sculpture by eight contemporary artists who reinfuse the quadrilateral (a few rectangles sneak in) with history, humanity, tactility, and spirituality. Ladd Spiegel, curator, is the second of Cecilia de Torres' artists to present a show contextualizing a loose family of Constructivist-inspired artists.
[Excerpt from the essay: Square Roots: Contemporary Quadrilateral Literalism with Heart by Jennifer Liese, editor of Provincetown Arts magazine.]
Eduardo Costa
Eduardo Costa is an Argentine artist who lived twenty-five years in the US and four in Brazil. He started his career in Buenos Aires as part of the Di Tella generation and continued to work in NYC, where he made a strong contribution to the local avant-garde. He collaborated with American artists Vito Acconci, Scott Burton, John Perreault and Hannah Weiner, among others. In Brazil, he participated in projects organized by Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Antonio Manuel, Lygia Clark, and others from the school of Rio. His work has been discussed in Art in America, Art Forum, and in the main books on conceptual art: A. Alberro, MIT, 1999; P. Osborne, Phaedon, 2002; Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea, Yale/Houston Museum of Art, 2004; Inés. Katzenstein, MoMA, New York, 2004, Luis Pérez- Oramas and others, San Antonio Museum of Art, 2004; Luis Camnitzer, University of Texas, 2007, among others. Eduardo Costa ́s work has been exhibited at the New Museum, New York; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Queens Museum of Art, Queens, New York; List Art Center, Boston; Miami Art Museum, Walker Art Center, Minnesota, MOMA, Buenos Aires; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, among others. A current project is to manufacture 30 Duchamp/Costa bicycles inspired by a 1980 model, for an exhibition on Duchamp-based work curated by Jessica Morgan (Tate Modern) for the Jumex Foundation in Mexico City.
Please click for CV and chronology
Marta Chilindron
b. 1951, La Plata, Argentina – lives in New York City since 1969
From her early veristic paintings to her contemporary sculptural installations, Marta Chilindron creates art that explores perspectival, temporal, and spatial relationships. In the 1990s, Chilindron began experimenting with furniture forms, altering their shapes to reflect her point of view in relation to physical space. In 1998, the artist began making collapsible, geometric sculptures in transparent colored acrylics, using hinges to allow movement. These pieces invite the viewer to participate, manipulate, and alter their shapes.
In 2010, Chilindron was invited to create a public installation as part of the Fokus Lodz Biennale in Poland, and her sculptures were featured as a special project at the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) in Long Beach, California in 2013. The artist had a retrospective exhibition at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts in 2014, and at Point of Contact Gallery at Syracuse University in 2018. She was also invited by El Museo del Barrio to be part of their "Diálogos" section at New York’s 2019 Frieze Art Fair. Chilindron has recently completed a large-scale sculpture titled Houston Mobius commissioned by the University of Houston for the inauguration of their Temporary Public Art Program. In Summer of 2023, her large-scale Orange Cube will be installed at the Audubon Terrace in New York City.
Chilindron's artworks are included in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; the Phoenix Art Museum, AZ; El Museo del Barrio, NYC; the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), Miami, FL; the State University of New York (SUNY), Old Westbury, NY; the Fonds d’art contemporain de la Ville de Genève (FMAC), Switzerland; the IBEU Cultural Institute, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as well as numerous renowned private collections.
Please click for Chronology and CV
César Paternosto
b. 1931 La Plata, Argentina – lives in Segovia, Spain
Please click for CV and Chronology
Kinetic Masters & Their Legacy
2019-2020 Autumn-Spring
Geometry at Play. Sculpture by Marta Chilindron
2019 Spring-Summer
César Paternosto, Rhythm of the Line
2019 Winter/Spring
Abstracting Gender, Seven Latin American Women Artists
2018 Winter-Spring
Expanding the Line: Drawing, Video, and Sculpture
2017-2018 Autumn-Winter
Contemporary Abstraction: Recent Works by Gallery Artists
2013 Autumn
César Paternosto - Painting as Object: the Lateral Expansion. New Works.
2012 Autumn
Marta Chilindron - Constructions
2011 Autumn
Works ON & OF Paper - Modern and Contemporary
2005 Autumn
Line - Plane - Volume / Sculpture: 1944-2006
2006 Winter
Marta Chilindron - Recent Works
2004 Spring
Homage Geometria Sensível - 25 Years Later
2003 Spring - Summer
Modernism: Montevideo & Buenos Aires 1930-1960
2001 - 2002 Winter
César Paternosto - WHITE/RED
2001 Autumn
Eduardo Costa - Volumetric Paintings
2001 Winter
North and South Connected: Abstraction of The Americas
1998 Autumn
Four Artists: Constructivist Roots
1998 Summer
Marta Chilindron - Dimensions
1997 Spring
65 Years of Constructivist Wood: 1930-1995
1995 Autumn
César Paternosto - Paintings, Sculpture & Works on Paper
1995 Spring