Gary Nader is pleased to present the exhibition Soto to Vigas, dedicated to the oeuvre of Venezuelan masters Jesus Rafael Soto and Oswaldo Vigas. The show will be on view from May 30 through July 31, 2019, at Gary Nader Art Centre.

We are featuring for the first time the work of two of the 20th century’s most influential Venezuelan artist. From Soto to Vigas pay homage to the oeuvre of two artists whose aesthetic proposals contributed a new and distinctive identity of art in Latin American during the second half of the 20th century and beyond. The exhibition presents a historical survey of the artists' prolific careers exploring the significance of their work for Venezuela’s art history and their input in the development of Modern Art in Latin America.

In the 1950s the art in Venezuela is renewed by the visual language revolution of creators such Jesus Rafael Soto and Oswaldo Vigas, they are among a significant number of Venezuelan artists who devoted their works to new aesthetics establishing the direction of the contemporary plastic in the country and abroad.

Jesus Rafael Soto shifts his work towards abstract art, his creations such as "Penetrables" are delicate constructions, optical illusions that react to the environment, exploring the surrounding space, and interacting with the receptor. In 1955, Soto was included, along with Yaacov Agam, Pol Bury, Alexander Calder, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Tinguely and Victor Vasarely in the exhibition "Le Mouvement" (The Movement) at the Denise René gallery in Paris, which marks the beginning of kinetic art.

“Artistic creation is a force which should preferably be directed towards the exploration of space, of the universe, of the infinite realities which surround us, but of which we are hardly conscious,” Soto once mused.

Oswaldo Vigas found his inspiration in the natural and cultural landscape of his natal Venezuela as well as the European avant-garde movements from the 20th century, particularly, Cubism and Constructivism. During the 1950s, Vigas moved his work towards geometric abstraction, searching for an authentic language to reveal his cultural background as a notion of personal identity. Then, abstract shapes turned into expressionist figures consolidating a personal pictorial language with profound cultural references. The figurativism of Vigas, with some transitory departures into abstraction, is translated throughout his well-known Brujas Series. The pictorial subject of witchcraft developed an oeuvre of innovative connotation, a fusion of Latin American ancestries with modern art.