Esteban Lisa: Playing with Lines and Colors, curated by Barbara Bloemink and Jorge Virgili, will be on display through May 27, 2012. It is a retrospective exhibition covering the work of Lisa from the 1930s to the 1970s. It is also the first solo museum exhibition of the artist’s work in the United States.
Together with Juan Del Prete and JoaquÃn Torres-GarcÃa, Lisa (Toledo, Spain, b. 1895) is one of the pioneers of abstraction in Latin America. However, this fact is mostly unknown because until very recently he was an unrecognized figure. This is primarily the result of two things: first, even though Lisa was a very prolific artist, he never exhibited during his lifetime, and second, the forms of abstraction he developed do not easily fit into the recognized modern abstract traditions that arose in Argentina and Latin America between the 1940s and 1970s.
Lisa considered himself first and foremost a thinker and a teacher, not a conventional art teacher, but an idealist and a humanist who believed that the production of abstract art informed by philosophy, science, aesthetics, music and ethics, could be the basis for spiritual enlightenment and creativity.
Magdalena Fernandez: 2iPM009 will also run through May 27. The exhibition was organized by The Patricia & Philip Frost Art Museum, Florida International University and curated by Julia P. Herzberg. The current exhibition has four additional small video works on display related to the Mobile Paintings and Mobile Drawings series. Magdalena Fernández (Caracas, b. 1964) is a Venezuelan artist whose work has been associated with one of the most significant modern artistic traditions— geometric abstraction.
There are many visual and conceptual connections between some of her seminal works and the works of Piet Mondrian, Kasimir Malevich, Sol LeWitt and the Latin American artists JoaquÃn Torres-GarcÃa, Jesús Soto, Gego and the Madà Group. While it is true that Fernández is determined to position her own work within the traditions that these artists have founded, it is also true that she has transformed those traditions, sometimes subtly, and sometimes drastically. Herzberg refers to the relationship between modern abstraction and Fernández’s work by saying, “Fernández used sound, light and moving image to give a 21st century twist to a 20th century utopian vision.”
Fernandez’s work represents a crossroad between art, science, nature and technology. She studied math, physics and graphic design in Caracas at Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, Universidad Simón Bolivar and Instituto de Diseño Fundación Neumann (1983-1989). She then moved to Italy where she was introduced to modern European geometric art by A.G. Fronzoni, Italian designer and architect. Soon after her first experimentations with abstract installations in the beginning of the 1990s, which the viewer will experience in this exhibition in the major installation, 2iPM2009 , light and movement became fundamental aspects of her work.
