After three years of research produced through the Cisneros Seminar, an initiative that arose from an agreement between the University of Texas and the Fundación Cisneros, an exhibit has been created called “The Geometry of Hope: Latin-American Geometric Abstraction from the Patricia Phelps de Cisnero Collections” (held at the Blanton Museum of Art from February 20 to April 22, 2007) accompanied by this catalog. The objective of the exhibit is to provide a clear vision to better understand abstract geometric art from Latin America, and contribute new perspectives to examine the visual vocabulary developed in the second third of the 20th Century, coming from some key cities in Latin America, which are considered here as context units.

This bilingual (English/Spanish) catalog, with colored illustrations of the works from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, includes an introduction by Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro and essays on each of the six cities that hosted the artistic proposals in the region between 1930 and 1970, which emphasize the role of Latin America as a model of hope and progress during the post-war period. Critical analyses of forty works supplement this curatorial concept.

Together with Dr. Pérez-Barreiro, director of the project and Latin-American Art Curator of the Blanton Museum of Art, the following people contributed with their writings: Cecilia de Torres, Erin Aldana, Paulo Herkenhoff, Luis Pérez-Oramas, and Serge Guilbaut. Another thirteen graduate students from several different universities who attended the Cisneros Seminar collaborated with the language included in the notes on the works of art.

The Rhythm of Color, with works from the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, establishes parallels between the origins and the development through time of the series of works Coloritmos and Objetos ativos [Active Objects], by Otero and de Castro, respectively. These sets of works created in the nineteen fifties, in different places and by artists who never met each other, followed common threads in their questioning of the esthetic and conceptual order: examining the boundaries between painting and sculpture, the relationship of painting to its support media and the experience of the spectator before works that are activated through color.

The presentations by Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, President of the Fundación Cisneros and by Walter Isasacson, President of the Aspen Institute, introduce the text written by the curator of the exposition, Luís Enrique Pérez-Oramas to allow us to become acquainted with the pioneering work of these two artists from the constructivist tradition, emphasizing the rigor, dedication, passion, and creativity shown throughout their careers. Sixteen full-color illustrations and brief biographies of Otero and de Castro complete this bilingual publication.

Beautifully designed and printed, this book-catalog opens with a text by the well-known Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, followed by an explanatory essay by the curator of the exposition, Ariel Jiménez, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art of the CPPC. Mercedes Iturbe, Museum Director of the Palace of Fine Arts; Luis Enrique Pérez-Oramas, Advisor to the CPPC and Adjunct Curator of MoMA; Iris Peruga; and Adele Nelson complete the list of writers, illustrated with full-page color reproductions of the works in the show. Also included: critical notes on the works that begin each of the eight thematic centers defined by the curators, biographies of all participating artists, and a large number of documents of the period that give account of the motivations and contexts that made possible the rise of the vanguard artists presented. In addition, there is a transcription of a conversation between Ariel Jiménez and Luis Enrique Pérez-Oramas, concerning the make-up of this collection.

In this essay, written in Spanish and English, Luis Pérez-Oramas discusses the contradictions present in the history of Venezuelan abstract-kinetic art, as a history of “shadows” or rather of “resistance of shadows.” Within this context, he understands shadows as that which underlies the work of art, that which is not seen, but which is latent and inevitably predestined to appear. This particular perspective is sustained by the work of Otero and Gego, singular representatives of Venezuelan modern abstract art, not so much as “… rigorously kinetic artists [but as] critical counter-figures of kineticism” as Oramas explains.

These shadows-footprints-trails, which resist disappearance, and which materialize from the past to the present and to the future, appear in the works of Otero and Gego and claim their historical space in an open confrontation with postulates defended by modernity. For this reason, they allow the author to demystify basic suppositions of kineticism: universality, novelty, rigorousness, formal cleanliness, absence of form, and freedom from prior esthetic traditions, and they make possible an opening that closes the way to the primacy of the regulating plan of modern rationalism and opens the path toward contemporary modalities and practices.

The carefully prepared text by Luis Pérez-Oramas is accompanied by illustrations of works by Alejandro Otero and Gego, as well as other important Venezuelan artists, such as Soto and Cruz-Diez, among others.

This publication reviews the exhibit of the same name held in Bogotá, at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá (MAMBo), from May 5 to June 29, 2005.

The catalog reproduces the text of Ariel Jiménez, Curator of the exhibit, previously published in the catalog that accompanied the exhibit Dialogs presented in Lima and Chile, in 2004. In this version, the author enriches the text by including important works of Colombian artists and fuller explanations that make it possible to understand even better the divergent, contrasting, and coinciding relationships that exist among this group of works of Latin American art belonging to the Colección Cisneros.

Mrs. Cisneros stated on the occasion of this exhibit: “ … by including works that range from figures to abstraction and from sculptures to video art and facilities, Diálogos offers us a lively demonstration of the richness and sophistication of Latin American art….”

Color reproductions of the works presented in the exhibit complement the essay by Ariel Jiménez, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art of the Colección Cisneros. María Elisa Elvira, Curator of the Museo de Arte of Bogotá, accompanies the exhibit with a text titled “Desde el Jardín” [“From the Garden.”] The publication contains, once again, the interview held by Luis Pérez-Oramas, Curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Curatorial Assistant to the Colección Cisneros, with Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Founding President of the Fundación Cisneros, as well as presentations by Gloria Zea, Director of the Museo de Arte Moderno of Bogotá, and James P. Gorman, Executive Vice President of Merrill Lynch, corporate sponsor of the event.

This catalog accompanies the show of the same name presented in the Centro de Arte de Maracaibo Lía Bermúdez, Maracaibo, Venezuela, from July 14 to October 2, 2005.

It reproduces the text by Luis Pérez-Oramas, Curator of the exhibit and Assistant to the Colección Cisneros, written in 2004, to accompany the traveling exposition of the same name, at the time that it began its national tour at the Museo de Arte Moderno Jesús Soto, in Ciudad Bolívar. Its goal is to relate a considerable collection of contemporary works belonging to the Colección Cisneros, produced by innovative national creators starting in the 1990’s, with another group of reference works of contemporary Venezuelan visual arts. The author reveals the presence of subtle ties that permit identification of prior models that unite the work of the young artists with the creators of past generations. Ties to yesterday, whether conscious or unconscious, have guided today’s artists by action or reaction, in their search for solutions to numerous esthetic problems.

In addition to the essay by Luis Pérez-Oramas, this publication contains color reproductions of the works presented in the exhibit. It also offers introductions by Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, President of the Fundación Cisneros, Lía Bermúdez, President of the Fundación Centro de Arte de Maracaibo, and Víctor J. Vargas Irausquín, President of the Banco Occidental de Descuento, corporate sponsor of the event.

This collection of interviews offers us an outstanding opportunity to understand the work and thought of Jesús Soto (Venezuela, 1923-2005), one of the most significant Latin American artists of the Twentieth Century.

The result of long hours of fruitful dialog between the master Jesús Soto and Ariel Jiménez, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art of the Colección Cisneros, these pages bring together many of the ideas and experiences that led this pioneer figure of Kineticism to bequeath us his work, which is without equal in the history of modern western art, a patrimony that makes Latin Americans feel proud.

Jesús Soto explores his memories and takes us from his simple childhood in his native city of Ciudad Bolívar, to his first encounters with painting and his tireless search for “thought” in space and time as dimensions beyond pictorial representation, up to the mature development of his esthetic concepts as materialized in the Penetrables, one of his most emblematic contributions.

This edition, corrected, enlarged, and bilingual, has been produced as a result of the great demand brought about by Cuaderno No. 6 of the same title, now out of print. Important representative works of each period illustrate the body of the conversations held between the artist and his friend, preceded by words of introduction by Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, President of the Fundación Cisneros.

This publication reviews the exposition of the same name held in Chile, in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, from November 25, 2004 to February 28, 2005.

The catalog reproduces the text by Ariel Jiménez, curator of the show, previously included in the publication that accompanies the exposition Dialogs, presented in Lima in 2004. In this version, the author enlarges on the explanations that allow us to get to become even better acquainted with the divergent, contrasting, or coinciding relations that exist among this group of works of Latin American art belonging to the Colección Cisneros.

Color reproductions of the works shown in the exposition, and reference pieces in black and white, complement the essay by Ariel Jiménez, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art of the Colección Cisneros. The publication also contains the interview given by Luis Pérez-Oramas, Curator of Modern Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Assistant Curator of the Colección Cisneros, to Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Founding President of the Fundación Cisneros; as well as presentations by Milan Ivelic, Director of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Chile and James P. Gorman, Executive Vice President of Merrill Lynch, corporate sponsor of the event.

This catalog was designed for the exposition of the same name shown in the Museo de Arte de Lima, from July 22 to September 26, 2004.

Ariel Jiménez, curator of the exposition, takes a group of works of Latin American art belonging to the Colección Cisneros, to set up a series of proposed “dialogs,” starting with the selection and regrouping of the works. Through seven thematic axes, the author submerges us in the esthetic environment of a complete and complex “system of representation” while showing us divergent, contrasting, and coincident relations that reveal subtle ties among works that are visibly dissimilar. In this particular conversation, they “tell us” of our past as Latin Americans, they allow us to recognize ourselves, and they lead us reflect on our history and our common culture.

The essay by Ariel Jiménez, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art of the Colección Cisneros, is accompanied by color reproductions of the works presented in the exposition. The publication also contains the interview given by Luis Pérez-Oramas, Curator of Modern Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Assistant Curator of the Colección Cisneros to Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Founding President of the Fundación Cisneros, as well as the presentation by Walter Piazza Tangüis, President of the Museo de Arte de Lima.

The Fundación Cisneros published this brochure to accompany the exposition of colonial art called Private Devotion, presented at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo del Zulia (MACZUL), Venezuela, from December 2, 2004 to March 28, 2005.

The main text by Jorge Rivas, curator of the exposition, explores the diversity of Venezuelan small-format religious painting from the colonial period, and makes clear the richness and variety of iconographic pictorial production in each one of the regions of the country, emphasizing the importance of religion in daily life during the Spanish period. Throughout the essay, one visits the most active artistic centers of the time: Tocuyo, Caracas, and Mérida. Through these small and intimate objects of art, laboriously worked, the reader is led to understand the characteristics of devotional painting in our country, and also becomes acquainted with the customs, traditions, and rites of the period.

This publication contains, in addition to the essay by Jorge Rivas, Curator of Colonial Art of the Colección Cisneros, color and black and white reproductions of the works shown.

This catalog accompanies the show by the same name presented at the Museo de Arte Moderno Jesús Soto, in Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela, from October 7, 2004 to March 30, 2005.

The exposition has the purpose of showing, for the first time in Venezuela, a significant set of contemporary works produced by innovative national creators starting in the 1990s, and which belong to the Colección Cisneros. In the main text of the catalog, Luis Pérez-Oramas, curator of the exposition, examines briefly the social function of our visual art production through an analysis of these contemporary works in relation to another group of reference works from modern Venezuelan visual arts. The author reveals the existence of ties that make it possible to identify precedents that have guided the artists in their search for solutions to a number of different problems in esthetics. The relationships established by either action or reaction among the works are sometimes voluntary, other times causal, and other times are the fruit of the curator’s efforts. But all have the purpose of showing the connections that unite the work of young artists with creators from past generations.

In addition to the essay by Luis Pérez-Oramas, Curator of Modern Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Assistant Curator of the Colección Cisneros, this publication contains color reproductions of the works shown in the show and reproductions in black and white of reference pieces.

The book on the work of Gego, Gertrud Goldschmidt, an important and influential Venezuelan artist born in Germany (1912-1994) is a co-edition by the Fundación Cisneros, Fundación Gego, and the Museo de Bellas Artes of Caracas.

This publication, written in Spanish and English, accompanies the retrospective exhibit Gego. Complete Works 1955-1990 presented at the Museo de Bellas Artes of Caracas from November, 2000 to April, 2001. Well-known researchers in visual arts: Iris Peruga, Luis Pérez-Oramas (Assistant to the Colección Cisneros), Mónica Amor, Ruth Auerbach, and Josefina López offer the reader knowledge and understanding of Gego’s work through specific approaches to the complex and diverse dimensions of the artist and her work. More than 300 impeccable photographic reproductions, a chronology of Gego’s life and work, and a bibliography complete the monograph.

This work opens with an introduction by Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, President of the Fundación Cisneros, and a prologue by María Elena Ramos, ex-president of the Fundación Museo de Bellas Artes, in addition to an introduction by Glenn Lowry, Director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

This careful publication was granted the National Book Award this year in the category Book as an Object of Art sponsored by the Centro Nacional del Libro. Another Venezuelan, Alvaro Sotillo, designer of the book, was the only Latin American to receive the Gutenberg Award in 2005 in recognition of the quality and graphic design of the work.

Co-edited by the Fundación Cisneros and Malba, the catalog Geo-metrías: Latin American Geometric Abstraction in the Colección Cisneros was published for the show of the same name presented in Argentina, at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (Malba) from March 14 to May 19, 2003.

This selection of works form the Colección Cisneros, belonging to the Geometric Abstraction movement, shows the singularity and fullness that this trend took in such countries as Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

With color reproductions of the works shown and biographies of the artists, this bilingual publication (Spanish-English) contains an essay by Ariel Jiménez, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art of the Colección Cisneros and also curator of the exposition, as well as an interview given by Luis Pérez-Oramas, Curator of Modern Art of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and assistant curator of the Colección Cisneros, to Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Founding President of the Fundación Cisneros.

Under this title, the Cuaderno series, published by the Fundación Cisneros since the year 2000, has come to its seventh issue. This edition, printed in Spanish and English, presents the speech of the same title, given by Richard Shiff in 2001 at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas, by invitation from the Fundación Cisneros. Shiff serves as the Director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Studies of Modernism at the University of Texas, Austin.

The major question that this essay deals with is whether Cézanne deliberately produced abstract art in some way. Shiff, from a very person point of view, places Cézanne (1839-1903) within a context that makes it possible to understand how art critics of his time classified him as an abstract artist, while also seeing why Cézanne, on the contrary, felt that he was linked to the landscape and naturalistic tradition of the 19th Century. Was this intuitive or intentional? We will never know the truth about his pictorial consciousness as an innovator of modernist practices and predecessor of abstraction; Cézanne, in keeping with his enigmatic character, did not reveal his motives. What is clear, however, is the influence, sometimes contradictory, that his art had on other artists and the way that it guided them toward abstractionism, even when he himself was not aware of it or did not want it.

Twelve (12) color reproductions of works by Paul Cézanne and Willem de Kooning accompany the complete text of the speech.

In addition to the main text, the publication contains black and white pictures of Soto and color reproductions of the emblematic works of this Venezuelan artist.

This catalog reviews the exposition PARALLELS: Brazilian Art in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century in Context, a show from the Colección Cisneros, presented at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro, from July 18 to September 22, 2002.

The exposition consists of the core of works of modern and contemporary Brazilian art belonging to the Colección Cisneros, a set of works from the abstract traditions of Venezuela, Argentina and Uruguay, as well as creations by some North American and European artists that form a part of the context that opened the doors to Latin American abstractionism.

This publication in Portuguese contains color reproductions of the works shown and a text in which Ariel Jiménez, Curator of the exposition and Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art of the Colección Cisneros, reflects on the Colección, presenting a point of view on Latin American art and its place in the field of western arts.

This brochure brings together the thoughts and decisions made by the curator in approaching the unusual space from the point of view of a museum presentation. His notes are enriched by color reproductions of the works selected.

This Cuaderno includes the speech given by Ariel Jiménez, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art of the Colección Cisneros, at the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Modernism at the University of Texas, Austin, with color reproductions of the works that illustrate his essay. This speech was given within the framework of the Latin American Art Seminar, created as a part of the Cooperation Agreement signed between the Jack S. Blanton Art Museum (University of Texas, Austin) and the Fundación Cisneros.

Utopias Americanas is the spanish version of Cuaderno No. 4

This Cuaderno includes the speech given by Luis Pérez-Oramas, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art of the Colección Cisneros, at the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Modernism at the University of Texas at Austin, accompanied by color illustrations of important works in Venezuelan visual arts. This speech was given within the framework of the Latin American Art Seminar, created as part of the Cooperation Agreement signed between the Jack S. Blanton Art Museum (University of Texas, Austin) and the Fundación Cisneros.

Hacia el siglo XX venezolanois the spanish version of Cuaderno No. 3

Calling this search a “temptation” toward pure forms, the author points out two of its modalities in abstract art: one with a normative character, under the aegis of Mondrian, which includes Soto and Cruz-Diez, and the other attempting to achieve the sensitive play among forms initiated by Kandinsky, which includes Gego and Mira Schendel. Color reproduction of the works selected for the exposition complement the curator’s essay.

The Fundación Cisneros published this catalog of the exposition GEO-METRÍAS Latin American Geometric Abstraction in the Colección Cisneros, for the show presented in the Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales (MNAV) in Montevideo, Uruguay, from July 3 to October 25, 2003.

The publication contains an introduction by Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Founding President of the Fundación Cisneros, texts by Ángel Kalenberg, Director of the MNAV in Montevideo, and by Ariel Jiménez, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art of the Colección Cisneros and curator of this exposition, as well as color reproductions of the works selected for the show.

The exposition – and this catalog which accompanies it – confirms the strong repercussions that geometric abstraction had in countries like Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela.