Vibración.
Modern Art from Latin America
The Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection
17 September 2010 ― 30 January 2011
Museumsmeile Bonn
Friedrich-Ebert-Allee 4
D-53113 Bonn
Tel. 0049 (0)228 9171 200
Fax 0049 (0)2289171 209
Modern Art from Latin America ― The Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection
17 September 2010 ― 30 January 2011
The rich cultural heritage of the Latin American continent has long fascinated European audiences. This fascination also extends to 20th-century Latin American art and literature, which tend to be perceived as largely dominated by Magic Realism (e.g. Gabriel García Márquez). The thematic focus of this exhibition seeks to counter this widely held misconception and to shed new light on the dynamic development of 20th-century abstract art in Latin America and its relationship to European classical Modernism. At the centre of the exhibition is the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, which caused a sensation when it first opened in the US and which now makes its first appearance in Germany.
The thematically arranged exhibition traces the key trends of geometric abstraction and presents the most vibrant centres of the style in Latin America – most of them in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Venezuela. Surprising visual links between artists of different generations and between different disciplines and styles provide new insights into one of the little-known and underappreciated chapters of international Modernism written by artists such as Joaquín Torres-García, Lygia Clark, Lucio Fontana, Julio Le Parc, Hélio Oiticica, Hércules Barsotti, Carmen Herrera, Alejandro Otero, Carlos Cruz-Diez and Jesús Rafael Soto.
A selection of more than two hundred works, spanning painting, sculpture, photography and drawing, presents key positions of Latin American geometric abstraction. Intensely urban, Latin American geometric abstraction evolved in a fruitful dialogue with international art movements, ranging from Concrete Art of the 1930s and 40s to Op Art and kinetic art of the 1960s and 70s.
European artists who had fled Nazi Germany for Latin America also played an important role in this vibrant cultural exchange across the continents.
In an effort to pay homage to the artistic achievement of these victims of National Socialism, the Art and Exhibition Hall has – pars pro toto – singled out three artists, Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt), Mira Schendel and Grete Stern, whose work, augmented with loans from international collections, is presented in greater depth and integrated into the exhibition. Thus Vibración brings back to Germany important works by a number of artists who were forced to emigrate to South America during the Nazi era. The sensuous and aesthetic experience of these works also serves to sharpen our awareness of our collective historical responsibility.
