Alejandro Puente in collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The work Untitled (1967, acrylic on canvas, 150 x 176 cm) by Alejandro Puente (1933-2013) has been incorporated to the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET) through the art gallery Henrique Faria.
It is the first artwork produced by an Argentinian artist that is included in the MET collection (that comprises five thousand years of art in its archives) and forms part of the group of works that on March 18 will move to the Met Breuer, the institution’s new space dedicated to modern and contemporary art from the XX and XXI centuries. This opening is one of the landmarks in the international art calendar of 2016.
Alejandro Puente’s work was presented at Henrique Faria’s exhibition Alejandro Puente: a shifting of the gaze and is a central piece in the restructuring of the artist from the gestural painting to the ‘sensitive geometry’, the style that determined his participation at the Di Tella Institute in the frame of the Semana de Arte Avanzado, in which, precisely, was included the work that is now part of the MET’s heritage. From this exhibition, Puente received the Guggenheim Grant and settled circumstantially in New York, where he later formed part of the legendary group exhibition Information (1970), which included artists such as Edward Ruscha, Dennis Openheimer, Helio Oiticica, Marta Minujín, David Lamelas and Jeff Wall, among others.
In Untitled, Alejandro Puente experiments with the organization of shapes and colors on the surface, extending the color to the edges of the canvas. Having displaced the focal point, he forces the spectator to shift his gaze toward the sides, as an anticipation of the strategies of contemporary art.
The piece was specially selected for the MET by Iria Candela (Santiago de Compostela, España) who, from 2014, holds the position of Director of Curatorship of Latin American Art Estrellita B. Brodsky focussed on the art of Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean y South America.
This modular piece, emblematic in the geometric Latin American art, will be exhibited from March 18 at the Breuer, one the jewels of rationalist architecture in New York, located in the intersection of Madison Avenue and 75th street. The building was constructed in 1963 to host the Whitney Museum and his given name is from Marcel Breuer (1902-1981), a Hungarian designer from the Bauhaus.
