£1,063
Contemporary & Post-War Art | 595
Auction: 16 April 2020 at 12:00 BST
Screenprint, 30/120, signed and editioned in pencil to margin, with printed paper slip, unframed
Biography:
Jesús Rafael Soto was a Venezuelan op and kinetic artist, a sculptor and a painter.
Soto was born in 1923 in Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela. He studied at the Escuela de artes plásticas in Caracas from 1942-1947 and then worked as director of the Escuela de bellas artes in Maracaibo, Venezuela, until 1950.
At this time, he moved to Paris, where he befriended Yaacov Agam, Jean Tinguely, and Victor Vasarely, as well as artists involved with the Galerie Denise René. Soto participated in Le mouvement (The Movement) at Galerie Denise René in 1955, which was the exhibition that effectively launched Kinetic art.
While his early work is illusionistic in style, Soto began to experiment with geometric and organic forms in his paintings and sculpture, moving toward abstraction by the end of the 1950s. By 1965 he had returned to his affinity for geometry and also began making linear, kinetic constructions.
Major exhibitions of Soto’s work were held around the world at Signals Gallery, London in 1965, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in 1971, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York in 1974, and Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris in 1979. These exhibitions each consisted of kinetic installations of plastic string or nylon thread, which transformed the gallery spaces into a constructed environment. The spectator’s experience within these spaces, which was often deliberately unsettling, was central to the work’s meaning.
Soto was commissioned in 1969 to create two murals for the UNESCO buildings in Paris. Several more public commissions followed in the coming years, including two in Venezuela.
The Museo de arte moderno Jesús Soto opened in 1973 in Soto’s city of Ciudad Bolívar. The museum houses work by Soto along with works by international avant-garde artists he admired, including Jean Arp, Kazimir Malevich, and Man Ray. Today, his works can be found in other important international collections, including Tate (London), Museum Ludwig (Germany), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna (Roma) and MoMA (New York).