Leon Tovar Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of its brand new exhibition space at 2 East 75th Street in New York’s Upper East Side. Only a few minutes from the Gallery’s flagship 71st Street location, this recently opened space breaks with the traditional “white cube” in order to provide an intimate and engaging viewing experience. With regular exhibition programming at both locations, the Gallery continues its mission to promote the visibility of artists from Latin America and their integral position within the history of modern art. Inaugurating 2 East 75th street is the exhibition Outlines, featuring a selection of Latin American Modernism ranging from the optical to the kinetic and beyond.

Highlights include works by Jesús Rafael Soto (1923–2005), Julio Le Parc (b. 1928), and Carlos Cruz-Diez (b. 1923), each of whom developed practices that reconfigured the relationship between the viewer and the work of art. Typical of Soto’s practice is Escritura Verde Superior (1998), which features a voluminous curtain of gracefully curving rods suspended before a striated surface, conjuring moiré patterns and electrifying optical stimuli through sophisticated figure-ground reversals. The effect of perceptual instability and flow is shared by the artist’s Venezuelan compatriot Carlos Cruz-Diez, as well as Le Parc, the Argentine co-founder of GRAV. The former’s Physichromie 1842 (2013) liberates color from the confines of form in a shimmering demonstration of color’s relativity, while the cut plastic squares of Le Parc’s Continuel Mobil, Transparent sur Blanc (1960–1969) catch light and reflections from the surrounding environment in a critical blow to the internal coherence of the art object.

These three groundbreaking artists sought to expand the definition of the work of art to include incidental environmental factors and the viewer’s movement in space, rendering the work of art no longer timeless but thoroughly embedded in the moment of perception. Likewise, Alejandro Otero (1921–1990) embarked on a similar mission by creating several monumental public sculptures composed of steel grid configurations harboring reflective and mobile elements. These structures are activated by air currents and light, transforming the work of art into a screen for atmospheric conditions. On view in the current exhibition is the 1980 artist’s proof of a smallscale edition of one such monumental sculpture titled Integral Vibrante, originally installed in El Conde, Caracas, on the occasion of the city’s fourth centennial celebration. In a similar vein, but through the use of stable elements, Sergio Camargo’s (1930–1990) poetic reliefs betray passage of time and changing luminosity, eliciting maximum effect throughout minimal means. In a meditative passage on living with one of Camargo’s White Reliefs, the curator, critic, and cofounder of Signals Gallery, Guy Brett, writes: If I had seen White Relief no. 8 only in an exhibition, under fixed lighting, I would have had no idea of how it changes every day, changes subtly under every condition of light, natural and artificial (or a mixture of the two), on brilliant days, gloomy days, dawn, dusk and afternoon, or by moonlight. Whatever is fixed and permanent about it acts as a foil and resonator for all that is changing.

The sleekness inherent within the artworks of the above-mentioned artists—their seriality and clarity—clashes with the work of Gego (1912–1994), who rendered malleable and material the ideal form of “the grid.” On view is an example of her intimate “Dibujos Sin Papel,” or “Drawings Without Paper,” the constituent components of which occupy a space between two and threedimensions in an important counterpoint to her kinetic contemporaries. Similarly avoiding the realm of the immaterial in favor of the profoundly material is the Colombian artist Feliza Bursztyn (1933–1982), whose assemblages have recently appeared in Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985, organized by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, which traveled to the Brooklyn Museum and the Pinacoteca de São Paulo. At a time when her compatriots Edgar Negret and Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar were producing sculptures often inspired by the technological marvels of New York City and space flight, Bursztyn scavenged for the abject cast-offs of modern ambition. The sculptures that composed her debut exhibition in 1961 constituted the earliest in her series of “Chatarras,” the Spanish for “Scraps,” which she salvaged from junk heaps and industrial refuse. In Bursztyn’s hands, detritus from the scrap pile speaks from a position of marginality, throwing into sharp relief the reality of Colombia’s process of modernization and questioning established conventions of gender and labor.

Seminal works by Edgar Negret (1920–2012) and Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar (1922–2004) round out the exhibition, including an example of the former’s “Magic Machines” and one of the latter’s famous “White Reliefs.” These historical artworks were completed at a time when each of these artists were living in New York City and were integral to the development of a new, “cool” language of abstraction alongside the likes of Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman, and Louise Nevelson.

Concurrent with Outlines is a presentation of work from some of the most recognizable figures in modern art from Latin America. Featuring seminal work by Marcelo Bonevardi, Fernando Botero, Joaquín Torres García, Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta, Rufino Tamayo, and Remedios Varo among others, this exhibition is now on view at 16 East 71st Street.