Reviews

It might be stated that present-day art has reached a point where it is possible to distinguish two trends: one is marked by the predominace of the spectacle and its propension to create a sensasionalist and dazzling aesthetics based on grandiloquent or technological formats

Juan Manuel Echavarría was a professional writer for many years when he set aside his literary endeavors and, in measured steps, turned his creative and intellectual attention to art.

In an article published in 20011, art critic Guy Brett marked out an interesting genealogy of Brazilian artists for whom the creation of books constituted a fundamental exercise.

The lesson left behind by Virginia Pérez Ratón, the woman who, from San José de Costa Rica, broadened the dimension and the practices of contemporary art in Central America and the Caribbean Region,

The death of master painter Carmelo Arden Quin constitutes a great loss for Latin American art, and above all, for the diffusion of this art in Europe.

After more than twenty years in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Praxis has moved its New York venue to the gallery district in Chelsea.

Works by Diego Rivera, Fernando Botero, Rufino Tamayo, and Beatriz Milhazes realized top prices at Christie’s two-session sale of Latin American Art on November 17 & 18 in New York.

The strength of the work drawing and installed painting in Silvia Gurfein’s (Buenos Aires, 1959) exhibition El libro de las excepciones (The Book of Exceptions) imposes itself in the exhibition space with double-height ceilings of Zabaleta Lab gallery.

A central figure of kinetic language, Julio Le Parc (Argentina, 1928) inaugurated a splendid artistic intervention in the Plaza de las Artes at the Borges Cultural Center, confirming the fact that his works are capable of transforming those who admire them.

Martín Bonadeo’s (Buenos Aires, 1975) exhibition El cielo en la tierra reflects an eager mind, passionate about the possibilities of technology.

Artist Marcelo Cidade (São Paulo, 1979) revisits some of the fundamental references of the Brazilian Modernist movement from Hélio Oiticica’s environments, through the tropicalist tenets, to Lina Bo Bardi’s architectonic paradigm.

Long influenced by the proposals of conceptual art, installations and performances, Cildo Meireles’s (Rio de Janeiro, 1948) works hold a dialogue with Brazilian poetic and social issues, and from this point of departure, it engages in more thorough investigations on the art object and sensory experiences.

Between September and October of the past year, the famous Brazilian artist Tung (Palmares, 1952) made a strong impression on the visitors to the Moscow Biennial. Supported by metal structures, laboratory flasks containing a yellowish liquid tied to phallic-shaped crystal fragments and simulacra of faeces.

“We can never bathe twice in the same river,” Heraclitus of Ephesus, the enigmatic Presocratic thinker pointed out. The river is the same river we always see, he explained, but its waters are constantly changing.

Time will reveal it all, the selective exhibition of works by the British artist Hannah Collins at the Museo de Arte de la Universidad Nacional, is a reflection of the marginality and displacement in contemporary society.

Several sculptural structures made of metal, plastic or textiles constitute this Venezuelan artist’s exhibition at Sextante Gallery, entitled “Gen y Figura”.

Far removed from the discourse of a curated show on a particular theme, this exhibition gathers together some of the best names in what critics have termed The Intermediate Generation.

In her first solo show in Venezuela, filmmaker and artist Mariana Rondón (Edo. Lara, 1966) delighted the public. Rondón has been doing research on the narrative possibilities of robotics for more than ten years.

Vicente Antonorsi (Caracas, 1952) presents an exhibition in which he contrasts the geometric and the rational.

Rooted in different intellectual fields contemporary philosophy, computer science, or cultural studies the exhibition “Atopia: Art and City in the Twentieth Century” is a response to a series of anguishing symptoms of the city in the culture of world globalization.

In Selected works 1998-2001, Glexis Novoa Vian’s (Cuba, 1964) exhibition at Farside Gallery, three works reveal a period of aesthetic transition.

The development, in the late 1950s, of the magnetic tape that made it possible to record image and sound, implied a vital democratization of mass culture.

The recently inaugurated O. Ascanio Gallery, Miami, presented the solo show “Nanín: Recent Works”, and who was also a disciple of Carlos Cruz Diez for 13 years.

José Luis Alonso Mateo (1964, Havana) has focused his works for several years on the analysis of the rites and symbols of power, the high classes, aristocracy and royalty hence perhaps the reason for his being dubbed El Conde (the Count).