The Fogg Art Museum presents more than sixty paintings, drawings, and sculpture in a groundbreaking exhibition focusing on Latin American works of art from the early 1930s to late 1980s. It is the first exhibition of its kind to be developed at the Harvard University Art Museums and brings art scholars and the interested public closer to understanding the complex nature of art in this place and time.

Torres-Garcia, Joaquin. Consruction in Black and White. Uruquayan, 1938. O il on paper mounted on wood. 34 3/4 x 40 inches. The Partricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, Caracas.

The exhibition contains the powerful work of such leading artists as Uruguayan Joaquín Torres-Garcia, Brazilians Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, Venezuelans Gego and Jésus Rafael Soto, and Argentinians Tomás Maldonado, Raúl Lozza, and Alfredo Hlito. The Cisneros Collection comes to the Art Museums from its creator Patricia Phelps and is considered the leading collection of its kind in the world.

The rich figurative tradition of Latin American art is well known. Yet, beginning in the 1940s and 1950s, many artists from Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Venezuela, along with their European counterparts, responded enthusiastically to earlier developments in abstract art, especially the paintings of Piet Mondrian and the De Stijl movement in the Netherlands and the sculptures of the Swiss artist Max Bill. Artists in Argentina gathered around the avant-garde magazine Arturo, and in 1946 formed the Grupo Madí, dedicated to the "absolute values" of "presence, movable dynamic arrangement, development of the theme itself, lucidity and plurality." These artists broke with conventional framed painting, exploring shaped canvases and adding neon lights and movable elements.

The avant-garde activities of artists in Buenos Aires were matched in Brazil by those of the Concretist movement in São Paulo and the Neo-concretists in Rio de Janeiro. At issue here was the materiality of the work of art itself. The Concretists favored the work of art as a made object, using various abstract geometric elements, while the Neo-concretists argued in favor of more expressive and organic forms and advocated the viewer's interaction with the work of art. At the same time, Constructivist artists in Caracas, Venezuela, were exploring new forms of kinetic art, adding movable objects to their paintings and sculptures and making works of art entirely out of movable parts.