The Juan March Foundation includes Leo Matiz in “América fría, la abstracción geométrica en Latinoamérica”
A group of abstract images, some of them never before reproduced, by the Colombian photographer Leo Matiz (1917-1998) are being exhibited starting February 11, 2011 at the Juan March Foundation in Madrid, Spain, in the exposition América Fría, La Abstracción Geométrica en Latinoamérica. This exhibition includes about 300 works of 60 plastic artists that explored the path of abstract art in Latin American from 1934 to 1973.
The ambitious retrospection on Latin American abstract art will exhibited until May 15th at the Juan March Foundation in Madrid, Castelló 77. This exhibition includes artists like the Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres García, the Venezuelan artist Jesús Rafael Soto, the Brazilian artists Waldemar Cordeiro and Iván Serpa, founders of the groups Ruptura y Frente, respectively.
The selection of photographs of Leo Matiz and the curation of the exposition were given to the Cuban-Spanish curator Osbel Suárez, who looked in Mexico and the United States along with Alejandra Matiz, President of the Leo Matiz Foundation and daughter of the photographer, at a collection of around three thousand negatives of abstract and geometric images that are dated from 1930s to the 70s.
To Osbel Suárez, the abstract images of Matiz, constituted a surprising discovery of the assimilation of the Colombian reporter of the aesthetic European vanguards about abstraction in photography and the mastery of the graphic reporter to achieve futuristic instant images with a high level of formal perfection based on deep contrast of lights and shadows.
The job of selecting visual works that Osbel Suárez carried out was based equally on museums and artistic collections in Europe, the United States, and Latin America, with the support of a group of curators and experts on Latin American art like Ferreira Gullar, Cesar Paternosto, Luis Pérez Oramas, Gabriel Pérez Barreiro, María Amalia García and Michael Nungesser.
The need to document the shapes that light makes on things pushed Leo Matiz to look for natural abstraction, as it exists in real life. The poetry of his abstract images, evidence of the profound and sensible observation of an artist of the wonderful world that manifests on the most unsuspected objects, exposed to the infinite road that the infinite metamorphosis of light projects on them. “The abstract is part of life. I look at the abstract that is in nature without recurring to any tricks, only playing with light. Abstract forms exist at certain times of day and then when light leaves, they banish”, the Colombian photographer confessed on some occasion.
The exposition América Fría, La Abstracción Geométrica en Latinoamérica, is an ideal stage to discover the vanguard’s spirit and the dazzling inventory of abstract forms achieved by Leo Matiz, the only Colombian artist selected for this exposition, and which reveal his creative effort to transform the established visual codes and achieve visual geometric compositions that escape our eyes in everyday life.
América Fría, La Abstracción Geométrica en Latinoamérica is an artistic exhibition without antecedents in Europe that seeks to show the public of the old continent the cultural and historical assimilation of the search for abstract and geometric aesthetics that Latin American artists created from the 30s to the 70s during the 20th century. The exposition is accomplished with the publication of a 500 page catalog that will be distributed in the museum and galleries of Latin America, Europe and the United States.
Fundación Juan March
AMÉRICA FRÍA, La abstracción geométrica en Latinoamérica
(1934-1973)-
Date: February 11 - May 15, 2011
Location: Castelló, 77- 28006, Madrid-España
Phn: 34 91 435 42 40 – Fax: +34 91 576 34 20
http://www.march.es/arte/madrid/exposiciones/america/index.asp
