Color and Motion, Ideas and Dreams: Modern and Contemporary Caribbean and South American Art from the Collection

The Story Behind Color and Motion, Ideas and Dreams

An Interview with Curator Patrice Giasson

In the 1960s and 1970s South America witnessed the emergence of new artistic trends based on the exploration of color, form, space, and motion, the influences of which are still visible in the work of contemporary artists today. Challenging representational traditions in vogue in their respective countries, the young artists working at that time were looking into new ways of engaging with the viewer by creating novel visual experiences. Artists from South American countries including Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela explored and expanded on geometric abstraction, kinetic and optical art, and gave birth to movements such as Concrete Art and Generative Art.

By the 1980s, several Latin American artists turned to new forms of figuration but also ventured into Conceptual Art. They engaged with social and political matters and, inspired by performative art and body art, began to use their own body as a support for self-representation and to reflect on questions of liberty, sexuality, memory, and identity. Themes related to spirituality and dreams, already present in the works of artists like Roberto Matta and Wifredo Lam, who had been in contact with European Surrealists in the 1940s, also reemerged in the work of the new generation. Artists also began exploring themes related to Afro-Indigenous practices such as Voodoo, Santeria, or to pre-Columbian mythology.

Selected from the Permanent Collection of the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, SUNY, this exhibition features more than twenty-five works, comprising sculptures, paintings, photographs and prints, created by major Latin American artists, including: Julio Antonio, Engels the Artist, Henry Bermudez, Leda Catunda, Carlos Cruz-Diez, José Luis Cuevas, Arturo Duclos, Lucio Fontana, Carlos Garaicoa, Florencio Gelabert, Ignacio Iturria, Wifredo Lam, Eduardo Mac Entyre, María Martínez-Cañas, Roberto Matta, Almir Mavignier, Marta María Pérez Bravo, Jesús Rafael Soto, Gerardo Suter, Luis Tomasello, and Eugenia Vargas.

Color and Motion, Ideas and Dreams: Modern and Contemporary Caribbean and South American Art from the Collection is curated by Patrice Giasson, the Alex Gordon Curator for the Art of Americas, and organized by the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, SUNY. 

Generous support for this exhibition is provided by the Alex Gordon Estate.