Zanna Gilbert, from the Getty Research Institute, and Pia Gottschaller, from the Getty Conservation Institute, demonstrate how Argentine artists working in the 1940s broke the tradition of painting-as-window with shaped paintings (marcos recortados) and works that even pushed beyond the wall to blur the boundary between sculpture and painting. Watch Video
The architectural legacy of utopian mid-twentieth-century modernism in Latin America is filled with buildings that have, in Lisa Blackmore and Celeste Olalquiaga’s words, “troubled afterlives.” The authors trace El Helicoide’s fitful iterations from its inception to its present day use, as a state security forces headquarters and prison. More
Zanna Gilbert, from the Getty Research Institute, and Pia Gottschaller, from the Getty Conservation Institute, show us how Brazilian artists such as Judith Lauand and Geraldo de Barros responded to increasing societal industrialization by experimenting with industrial paints and application methods that eliminated evidence of the painter’s hand. Watch Video
Lucas Ospina analyzes Nicolás Consuegra's exhibition "El espacio del lugar. El lugar del espacio" to discuss the value that some artists in Latin America attribute to the "white cube". In this case, Consuegra reproduces a space within another space, expanding the limits of the pictorial plane and making the white cube the work itself. More
Katherine Manthorne makes a case for the Austrian nineteenth-century world traveler Ida Pfeiffer as a proto-feminist. Pfeiffer wrote accounts of her journeys, undertaken beginning when she was 45 years old and had separated from her husband after raising the couple’s sons. Published in her native German, the journals were popular enough to be translated into several languages. More
Excerpted from her book Spectacular Modernity, Lisa Blackmore’s statement posits that the political, social, and cultural forces that converged to create Venezuela’s “modern spirit” in the mid-20th century unfolded as a spectacle, revealing the spaces, practices, and aspects of life comprising the combined aesthetic and political agenda of its power relations. More
