COLOR

Paintings, Sculpture, Ceramics

“Generally speaking, color is a power that directly influences the soul… Color is the keyboard… The artist is the hand that plays.” 

Wassily Kandinsky in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1910.

Inés Bancalari (Argentina 1946), Marcelo Boullosa (Argentina 1957), Lidya Buzio (Uruguay 1948-2014), Marta Chilindron (Argentina, 1951), José Antonio Fernández-Muro (Spain 1920-2014), María Freire (Uruguay 1917-2015), Juan Iribarren (Venezuela 1956), Jesús Matheus (Venezuela 1957), and César Paternosto (Argentina 1931).

César Paternosto’s “Orange” was painted in 1965 as the artist was exploring atonal harmonic chords.  By juxtaposing curvy bands of blue, yellow, red, purple, and green on an orange background, a color combination that – as certain sounds in atonal music are jarring to the ear – so too are these colors to the eye.  In “Baires #1” 2000, a later work from his Confluence series, a pale powdery peach is the textured background color for thin bright red, orange, brown, and purple lines that play counterpoint rhythms in this delicate work.

By contrast, the chromatic boldness of red, acid green, fuchsia, and orange in Inés Bancalari’s thickly textured geometric paintings, reveals her interest in Amerindian cultures.  Executed after a trip to Guatemala in 2005 where she studied and collected local textiles, the three works in the exhibition reflect the weavers’ unique gift with color.                       

María Freire’s 1954 “Spatial Construction” is a solid iron bar painted in bright light blue, that is bent into curves and can be placed in multiple positions. A large-scale reproduction was made in 2000 and is installed in the Parque de Esculturas del Edificio Libertad in Montevideo, Uruguay.  

Similarly, Marta Chilindron’s “Sixteen Trapezoids,” a 2015 geometric sculpture, can also change into radically different shapes.  From a tightly compressed form of transparent green acrylic, the piece can unfold into a crescendo of quadrilateral planes.  Hinges allow movement inviting the viewer to participate, manipulate, and transform Chilindron’s sculpture.  

About his 2013 vibrant red and black canvas square painting “La forma es color” (“The Form is Color”), Jesús Matheus stated that “the exact height and width of the square shape - frame the serial development of pictorial events that conjure other scales and dimensions where color takes root.  The whole process amounts to an intuitive grasp through color of a rational dictum.  Thereby the square becomes an impossible place: intuitive yet rational, endless yet finite, at once serial and unique.” 

Lidya Buziowas well-known for her exquisite ceramic vessels painted with New York cityscapes. In 2008, the artist began a new approach to abstraction, employing planes of solid color. These bright color combinations added a dynamism that brought the object to life.  As Buzio explained, she wanted her new pieces to be joyful, to serve geometry, and to stand out chromatically.  

There is a playful touch of kinetic art in Marcelo Boullosa’s dazzling trio of canvases from 2005-2008.  The three share the same geometric pattern of red, green, blue, and yellow squares on a white background. However, upon close inspection, the squares appear slightly askew rather than aligned in straight rows, prompting the viewer’s eye to perceive each composition as if it were undulating.   

In “Amarillo sobre gris,” a 1984 mixed media on wood by José Antonio Fernández-Muro, the bright yellow on top is followed by bands of grey graffiti-like lines and dot patterns in relief.  Adding relief into his abstract canvases, like the imprint of an actual manhole cover in another work, dates to Fernández-Muro’s encounter with pop art in 1970 when the artist left Buenos Aires and settled in New York City. 

Juan Iribarren’s 2017 “Blue Diptych” brings the radiance of pure celestial light into the gallery.  The center color planes are framed on three sides by dynamic black, ocher, and green lines.  Light, that natural miraculous element, elusive, and never the same for any length of time, is the subject underlying Iribarren’s atmospheric abstractions.

Press Release: COLOR

Inés Bancalari

b. 1946 Buenos Aires, Argentina - lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Drawing inspiration from diverse sources ranging from the stained glass windows of Chartres Cathedral to Andean textiles, Inés Bancalari's artistic background is truly international. 

The artist graduated as valedictorian with a professor's degree in painting from the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredón in Buenos Aires, and studied under Aurelio Macchi and Luis Barragán.  She also worked with Robert Beverly Hale and Frank Mason at the Art Students League in New York.  Her extensive travels and experiences have profoundly impacted her approach to art.

Although Bancalari's early works were primarily representational, her career shifted towards abstraction in the 1980s.  For almost two decades, the color red dominated her brightly colored geometric canvases and collages, however, in recent years she has begun to work in soft pastels.  These new large scale works seem to evoke textiles through their layered planes of superimposed colors.

Artworks by Bancalari have been featured in group and solo exhibitions in the Americas as well as in Europe.  In addition to pursuing her own artistic career, for many years Bancalari has also taught art from her studio in Buenos Aires. 

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Marcelo Boullosa

b. 1956, Buenos Aires, Argentina – lives in Buenos Aires

The concept of repetition and its effects on visual perception inform the work produced by Argentinean artist, Marcelo Boullosa.  Methodical in his artistic technique, Boullosa often repeats a single gesture to create intricate drawings, collages, and paintings which appear to reverberate with echoed shapes and patterns. 

In comparison to his monochrome drawings of carefully etched lines, curves, and other graphic elements, Boullosa executes his paintings of repeated squares in both muted pastels and primary colors.  At first glance, these paintings seem to follow a strict, grid-like pattern; however, upon closer inspection, they reveal variations in both color and line.  These slight variances translate as optical illusions within the viewer’s eye, as the squares appear to rhythmically pulsate across the canvas.

In 1994, Boullosa's artwork was selected to represent Argentina as part of the V Havana Biennial.  Works by the artist are included in private collections across Europe, the United States, and South America, as well as at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

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Lidya Buzio

b. 1948, Montevideo, Uruguay -  d. 2014, Greenport, New York

A unique talent in the world of ceramics, Buzio learned to create, form, and shape clay sculptures from the master ceramicist José Collell, based on ancient Amerindian practices.  Buzio continued to work within this same method, cutting earthenware slabs into geometric shapes, and then combining these cylinders, cones, and hemispheres to form the body of her sculptures.  Using special pigments which she mixed herself, the artist drew and painted directly onto her unfired works.  Before firing, Buzio burnished her pieces; this step serves to fuse the paint into the clay and results in the unique luminosity and distinctive hues that characterize her artworks. 

After moving to New York in the early 70s', Buzio's pictorial vocabulary shifted to reflect her new urban surroundings, inspiring her to create her New York Cityscapes, with their evocative rooflines, cast iron architecture, and water towers.  Her last series of abstract geometric designs executed in bright primary colors, represented a new direction in her practice. 

Buzio's ceramics are found in the Brooklyn Museum New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Smithsonian National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York; the Racine Art Museum, Wisconsin; the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas; the Honolulu Academy of Art, Hawaii; the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; the National Museum of History and the Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan.  Buzio’s work is also included in several other international museums and private collections.

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José Antonio Fernández-Muro

b. 1920, Madrid, Spain - d. 2014 Madrid, Spain

Born in Madrid in 1920. In 1938 he moved to Argentina.  He had his first solo exhibit at the Witcomb Gallery in Buenos Aires in 1944.

He won a grant from Unesco to study museology in Europe and the United States between 1957 and 1958.  In 1959 he held a solo exhibit at the OEA, Washington DC.  In 1960 he received an award from the Guggenheim Museum in New York. He exhibited at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes with the Grupo de los Cinco. He partook in the Premio Nacional de Pintura del Instituto Torcuato Di Tella in 1960.  In 1961 he was part of “Latin America: New Departures”.  

He was included in the envoy to the VI Sao Paulo Biennial. He exhibited at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. He moved to New York in 1962, where he resided until 1970, when he moved to Europe with his wife Sarah Grilo.  He was part of the inaugural exhibition at the Andrew-Morris Gallery in New York in 1962.  He partook in other various exhibitions: Del arte concreto a la nueva tendencia (1963); Argentina en el mundo.Artes visuales 2 (1965), “4 Sculptors, 2 Painters” (1963); “Magnet: New York” (1964); “New Art of Argentina” (1964); two solo exhibits at the Bonino Gallery (1965 and 1967); “The Emergent Decade” (1966); “Latin American Paintings from the Salomon R. Guggenheim Museum” (1969); “Latin American Paintings and Drawings from the Collection of John and Barbara Duncan” (1970); “Looking South: Latin American in New York Collections” (1972).  In 1980 he and his wife acquired a studio in Paris and alternated their stays between Paris and Madrid.  In 1989, they moved permanently to Madrid, where he passed away in 2014.

María Freire

b. 1917, Montevideo, Uruguay - d. 2015, Montevideo, Uruguay

María Freire is one of the Southern Cone's most productive and engaged, if also one of the least-known, artists working in the Constructivist tradition. Freire trained at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Montevideo from 1938 to 1943, studying under José Cuneo and Severino Pose and at the Universidad del Trabajo under Antonio Pose. Her first sculptures indicate the profound influence of African art on her work, something of an anomaly for an artist in South America at that time. In the early 1950s, after meeting her future husband, the artist José Pedro Costigliolo, her art became more influenced by European non-figurative art, such as Art Concret group, Georges Vantongerloo, and Max Bill. In 1952 she co-founded the Arte No-Figurativo group with Costigliolo in Montevideo, and exhibited with them in 1952 and 1953. Freire exhibited regularly in the National Salons from 1953 to 1972.  In 1953 Freire and Costigliolo were invited to the 2nd Sao Paulo Biennial, where they came into contact with Brazil's enthusiasm for geometric abstraction. In 1957 Freire and Costigliolo won the “Gallinal” travel grant which they used to live and study in Paris and Amsterdam, and to travel throughout Europe until 1960, meeting many of the historical pioneers of abstract art, including Antoine Pevsner and Georges Vantongerloo. In 1959 they exhibited in Brussels, at the Galerie Contemporain. She was invited again to the Sao Paulo Biennial in 1957 and the XXXIII Venice Biennale in 1966.

Freire developed her work within a strict, yet variable formal vocabulary, often switching between periods of greater or lesser degrees of abstraction.  Her series Sudamérica, worked on from 1958 to 1960, employed cut planes and polygonal forms in a reduced palette. Freire taught drawing in an Architecture Prep School and wrote art criticism for the journal “Acción” from 1962 to 1973.  Around 1960, she began to experiment with looser forms of abstraction, and a more expressive range of colors, resulting in her series Capricorn and Cordoba, 1965-1975, and later on she would create volumetric disturbances by dividing the surface with repeated forms or by creating chromatic modulation sequences in her series Variantes y Vibrantes, 1975-1985. In 2000, she began to produce large-scale public sculpture in Uruguay. 

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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.

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Juan Iribarren

b. 1956, Caracas, Venezuela – lives in New York City

Juan Iribarren was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1956, and resides in New York City. He received a B.F.A. from American University, Washington, D.C. in 1978. He furthered his studies at the Université Paris 1 (Pantheon-Sorbonne) in Paris, where he obtained both a Maîtrise d’esthétique in 1982, followed by a D.E.A. (Advanced Studies Diploma). From 1994 to 2012, Iribarren was a Professor at Caldwell College, New Jersey, where he taught courses in drawing, painting, and Art History.

Juan Iribarren’s work has been shown extensively in both solo and group exhibitions throughout Europe and the Americas. The artist is also represented in various prestigious private and public collections, including: the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Caracas; the Galería de Arte Nacional, Caracas; and the Collection of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros.

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Jesús Matheus

b. 1957 Caracas, Venezuela - lives in Boston, Massachusetts

Since 1973, Jesús Matheus has studied the art of print-making, both in his native Venezuela, as well as in Brazil. His paintings and drawings reflect this graphic background through their linear and textural layers.

Matheus executes drawings, paintings, and installations that evoke a history culled from the artist's research on culture and ethnicity, his expeditions throughout South America, and other personal experiences. He cites modern Latin American artists such as Joaquín Torres-García and Wifredo Lam, as well as indigenous and pre-Columbian craft and folk art, as strong influences on his geometrically minimalist artistic production.

In 2014, a solo exhibition of the artist's work was on view at Cecilia de Torres, Ltd. in New York. This show, entitled "Jesús Matheus: The Ideogram of Place," was curated by Juan Ledezma, and was accompanied by a catalogue of the artist's oeuvre.

Matheus has taught drawing and print-making at the Armando Reverón Institute in Caracas, and has exhibited extensively around the globe.

The artist's work is part of several public and private collections including: the Cisneros Foundation and the Carlos Cruz-Diez Museum of Illustration and Design in Venezuela; the Wifredo Lam Center in Cuba; and the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in New York.

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César Paternosto

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

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The City as Muse: Works by Lidya Buzio and Sarah Grilo
2021 Spring

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

Juan Iribarren. Walls, Windows, and Nocturnes
2018 Spring-Summer

Abstracting Gender, Seven Latin American Women Artists
2018 Winter-Spring

Expanding the Line: Drawing, Video, and Sculpture
2017-2018 Autumn-Winter

Under the Influence
2016 Summer

Face to Face
2015 Winter

Jesús Matheus: The Ideogram of Place
2014 Autumn and Winter

Contemporary Abstraction: Recent Works by Gallery Artists
2013 Autumn

Obsessive Traces: Drawings by Five Artists
2013 Spring

Lidya Buzio - Ceramics
2012 Winter

César Paternosto - Painting as Object: the Lateral Expansion. New Works.
2012 Autumn

Marta Chilindron - Constructions
2011 Autumn

Bright Geometry
2010 Summer

Inés Bancalari - New Paintings and Collages 2004-2007
2008 Autumn - Winter

Works ON & OF Paper - Modern and Contemporary
2005 Autumn

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

Inés Bancalari - Paintings and Collages
2004 Autumn

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

A Latin American Metaphysical Perspective
2000 Autumn

Square Roots
2000 Winter

North and South Connected: Abstraction of The Americas
1998 Autumn

Four Artists: Constructivist Roots
1998 Summer

Marta Chilindron - Dimensions
1997 Spring

The Still Life
1996 Spring

65 Years of Constructivist Wood: 1930-1995
1995 Autumn

César Paternosto - Paintings, Sculpture & Works on Paper
1995 Spring