Reviews

Oscar Smoje’s (Buenos Aires, 1939) new exhibition of works on paper, Oso inédito, is worthy of celebration, since it is increasingly difficult to see this artist’s production in public.

The TV and the celebrity gossip magazines have brought to the forefront of public consideration a series of vaudeville characters, dancers with generous curves in the habit of airing with unusual shamelessness and before millions of people details of their sometimes turbulent existence.

Hélio Oiticica: Museu É o Mundo (Museum is the World) opened on Saturday, March 20.

It would be tautological to say that Johanna Calle is one of the Colombian contemporary artists with the greatest projection.

Traditionally, art collecting has been one of the marginal themes in the history of Colombian art.

For many years, Colombian artist José Alejandro Restrepo has developed a research focused on the relationships between art, body, religion and violence.

With the persistence of the theme of anguish in contemporary man, Alirio Rodríguez (Venezuela, 1934) presents his latest exhibition, which relates to the 1976 series “In front of the abyss".

The work that is being currently exhibited by José Luis López Reus (Caracas, 1966) at Fernando Zubillaga Gallery has a rela- tion with his final stage as a textile designer.

José Gabriel Fernández (Caracas, 1957) had in the past developed some installations using bull fighters ́cloaks.

Iván Puig was born in 1977 in Guadalajara, the same city where the seminal Mexican master, Dr Atl, had come into this world 102 years earlier, and he abides by artistic concepts that tend to revolutionize creative visual praxis in the 21st century, just like Mr. Gerardo Murillo did in Mexican visual arts at the beginning of the 20th century.

Decoy, the exhibition of works by Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza, gathers together objectual constructions whose conformation and referential potential are the result, in each case, of interactions of varying degree and nature between different disciplines, models and systems of cultural production.

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.