The Sites of Latin American Abstraction
Curated by Juan Ledezma
December 6, 2006 - February 18, 2007
The exhibition intends to explore a rarely addressed aspect of Latin American abstract art: To what extent the simultaneous development of an abstract movement in different artistic centers (Argentina and Uruguay, Brazil, Venezuela) responded to the cultural and socio-political need of reconsidering, on the basis of modernist art, the prospect of a previously much-discussed Latin American identity. Given such a broad scope, the exhibition proposes a series of intersections between developments mobilized by their own local histories. Those intersections coincide on a single node of inquiry: the constitution of a Latin American subject in the post-war period, a period during which the subcontinent experienced a process of economic and social development that necessarily involved shifts in the self-understanding of Latin American culture. Such topics raise the question on the specificity of Latin American abstraction. The exhibition provides an answer to that question by examining the region's emphasis on concrete art as a trait that distinguished local developments from those trends that characterized the abstract movement in the United States, a movement much more directed toward the dissolution of form in favor of what has been termed "opticality." The exhibition's theoretical framework, on the other hand, attempts to relate Latin American concrete art to Russian Constructivism and Suprematism, movements informed by distinct political programs that proposed the reconstitution of a social, cultural and political identity on the basis of the reconstruction of collective vision. Following the historical development of Russian avant-garde art (abstraction, the object, the project of collectivity and the revolutionizing of public space), the exhibition's sections examine the coincidences and differences, both formal and historical, between these two modalities of abstraction.
