Reviews

The most recent solo show of the renowned Venezuelan artist José Antonio Hernández-Diez (Caracas, 1964) is the point of departure for a work in progress he has titled Petare 2009.

Curator’s Voice Art Project is a cultural management project led by Miami-based Venezuelan art critic and curator, Milagros Bello.

Francine Birbragher’s curatorial work for the exhibition In body and Soul: The Performance Art of María Teresa Hincapié, featured at the Frost Art Museum, proves to what extent the work of this Colombian artist who had a short life opened an indelible path for performance in the continent: a complete fusion between the artwork and everyday life.

The Newark Museum is a small gem that has unjustifiably been kept outside of the radar of the New York area museums spotlight. Fortunately for us, upon its one hundredth anniversary, this small museum is finally getting some attention with Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America.

When the then Center for Inter American Relations in New York commissioned Argentine artist Marta Minujín to develop the project that could recently be seen at the Americas Society which later absorbed the mentioned center, Minujín was well known in the art scene, and not only in the underground one.

A small, exquisite exhibition of vintage photographs from the 1970s by Leandro Katz affords us a view of this little known body of work.

In this second solo show that the Uruguayan artist presented at the New York gallery, Alexander Gray, Luis Camnitzer (Lübeck, 1937) considered a leading figure in the realm of Latin American conceptual art posed once again, a reflection on the dictatorial regime that ruled Uruguay between 1973 and 1985.

From April 15 through May 23, the first solo show of Cuban artist Alexandre Arrechea will be held at Magnan Metz Gallery, New York, in this new space which until 2009 was known as Magnan Projects.

It might be said that the new proposal that Sandra Gamarra (Lima, Peru, 1972) presented in the Madrid gallery Juana de Aizpuru was comprised of two projects which, although grouped under the same title − In Order of Appearance − were clearly differentiated from a formal point of view.

Mario García Torres (Monclava, México, 1975) disembarks in the MNCARS with two installations staged in what used to be the old Sabatini Building coal vaults.

We are not going to discover at this stage the effort and hard work invested by the Daros Latinamerica Collection into putting together holdings that cover the best of Latin American art.

Needless to recall the great debt that Brazilian contemporary art owes to its indigenous roots, to its indigenous peoples, and to the process of colonization, which have made it possible to develop, during the present and the past century, some of the most interesting and acclaimed proposals in the international art scene.

In the recent pictorial production of Aquiles Azar Billini (1965), his infinite combinations of fire, water, earth and air imply the notions and processes of light, life, trace, dissolution, transformation, transmutation, reaction and fertilizing friction.

After years of investigation around bringing to life the forms he creates in a virtual world, Elias Crespin (Caracas, 1965) plays not only with the spatial but also formal and temporal categories of perception.

Un diminuto hombre que limpia una oreja, una mano que sostie- ne un saquito de té, personajes extraños de siluetas casi abstractas.

Photography should not be shown merely as a physical representation of a being or a thing.

André Leroi-Gourhan, a specialist in Paleolithic Art, pointed out that “the human act par excellence is perhaps not so much the creation of tools as the domestication of time and space, or, to put it differently, the creation of a human time and space”1.

Paulo Bruscky was jailed and interrogated several times during the military regime that dominated Brazil as of 1964.

Iván Navarro (b. Santiago de Chile, 1972, based in New York) belongs to the generation of Latin American artists who, as of the 1990s, have reelaborated the relationships between modernism and contemporaneity.

For several years now, the work of Argentinean artist Alejandro Puente (Buenos Aires, 1933) has been strongly revalued by different sectors within the field of the visual arts.

In the 1960s sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick coined the term “kipple” to explain the astonishing ability of household objects to accumulate in piles of unwanted clutter.

The name Matías Duville (Buenos Aires, 1974) started to appear shyly in the Argentine circuit at the beginning of the present decade.

Javier Téllez inscribed his name in the history of contemporary art in Venezuela when he transplanted the sinister atmosphere of a psychiatric institution to the spaces of the Museum of Fine Arts in Caracas.

In the exhibition of works by Félix González Torres currently on display at the Museum of Latin American Art in Buenos Aires, art merges with life.