He Boca Raton Museum of Art in Miami Florida presents “Oswaldo Vigas: Paintings between Latin America, Africa and Europe”, a collection on loan from the Oswaldo Vigas Foundationwhich the Venezuelan painter (1926-2014) created in Paris during the 1950s and in Venezuela from 1969 to 1976, and never before seen in the United States.
This exhibition in South Florida kicks off a year-long series of international events, in collaboration with various institutions and museums, to honor the centenary of the birth of Vigasone of the most prolific and influential Venezuelan painters of the 20th century. The global tributes will be organized by the Oswaldo Vigas Foundation, chaired by his son Lawrence Beams and by the Director of the Foundation, Dilia Hernandez.
“Oswaldo Vigas: Paintings between Latin America, Africa and Europe” is a tribute to the artist by his son, the award-winning filmmaker Lawrence Beamsas an intimate lens through the eyes of his father-son relationship, in honor of the release of the new catalog raisonné of his father’s work.
beams he compared his art to his birthplace: “The Americas are a cosmos. Our continent is full of dark signs and warnings: telluric and magical signs that are deep components of our condition. At the same time that they reveal something, these symbols also engage us in a disturbing world of effervescence. The intention of my painting is to reach them, interpret them and translate them into new notices. My paintings are halfway between Latin America, Africa and Europe”.
The Venezuelan is famous as a leading figure of modernism in Latin Americawith a career of 70 years, being his first individual exhibition in the city of Washington DC in 1958, and recognized by critics as an artist who bridged the gap between the iconography pre-columbian and the experimental art movements of the 20th century.
The artist received the International Association of Art Critics Award on two occasions (in 2008 and 2014) and received the Latin Union Award in Washington, D.C. in 2004.
His first online catalog will allow scholars, curators, collectors and the general public to access information about the artist, including more than 3,000 paintings, history of galleries and museums, and publications that detail the trajectory of Oswaldo Vigas.
It also provides a clear understanding of Vigas’ early works in terms of his vision of the Americas and his period in Paris that resulted in his famous murals of the Central University of Venezuela (UCV), now listed as Heritage of humanity by unescoand the many works he created before his death in Venezuela in 2014.
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Oswaldo Vigas lived with great artists, but mainly with Picasso
Concitadoras, Oswaldo Vigas (1972)
A self-taught painter and muralist, Vigas’ work includes paintings, sculptures, engravings, drawings, ceramics and tapestries. The artist participated in more than one hundred individual exhibitions and is represented in numerous public institutions and private collections around the world.
beams was contemporary of Picasso, Ernst, leger, calder and The mand approached these artists while they were living in Paris over the decades 1950’s and 1960’sespecially Picasso, who encouraged Vigas to reflect on notions of ancestry in his work.
Was the first artist to represent Venezuela at the Venice Biennale when its national pavilion was inaugurated in 1954, and again in 1962 to organize the Venezuelan section. He was successful in France, where his works were exhibited alongside artists Jean Arp, Chagall, Giacometti, Laurens, Magritte, Matisse and others.
He identified himself as mestizo, a South American term for a person of mixed indigenous and Spanish heritage. When he was a child, he was very interested in the pre-Columbian artifacts and petroglyphs of the region. Although in his paintings you can find abstraction and figuration, beams he did not want his work to be labeled as either.
A modernist that masterfully blended elements of the cubismhe surrealismhe constructivism and the neofigurationeach painting is imbued with his ongoing exploration of his mestizo identity.
Vigas’ work is represented in numerous institutions such as the Houston Museum of Fine Arts; he San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; he Musée Jean Lurçat et de la Tapisserie Contemporaine in Angers, the Musée Des Beaux Arts D’Angers and the Musée Des Beaux Arts in reims.
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