Ascaso Gallery presents an ambitious exhibition within the frame of ArtBasel Miami Beach 2018 that reviews the most important artistic tendencies in Venezuela during the 20th century.
Jesús Rafael Soto, Mural 1967

Jesús Rafael Soto, Mural 1967

Figuration and Abstraction are the two languages that have defined the panorama of visual arts in Venezuela during the 20th century. The exhibition “Venezuelan Abstraction and Figuration XX Century” includes 12 Venezuelan artists of great experience in the international art circuit. Artists whose works are fundamental references to understand the evolution of both figurative art and Abstraction in its most diverse expressions such as, for example, kinetics. The list of participating figurative artists: Héctor Poleo, Armando Reverón, Armando Barrios, Alirio Palacios, Carmelo Niño, Francisco Narváez and Cornelis Zitman. Abstract art meanwhile represented by: Jesus Rafael Soto, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Francisco Salazar and Rafael Barrios and Victor Valera.
Armando Reveron, Nochebuena 1948

Armando Reveron, Nochebuena 1948

“Venezuelan Abstraction and Figuration XX Century” visits a broad spectrum of creation that includes more than six generations of Venezuelan artists. Here the viewer can experience through approximately twenty paintings, sculptures and installation; artists who have marked the history of contemporary art in Venezuela in the second half of the 20th century. “Venezuelan Abstraction and Figuration XX Century” includes unique works distributed in two rooms. In the first room of the gallery are the figurative artists grouped, in the second the abstract and kinetic ones. Connected all, for being an essential part of the recent history of art in Venezuela. These are very particular works of great importance and consideration, such as Armando Reverón’s figurative painting Nochebuena (1948) or the spectacular kinetic artwork Vibración azul (1999) by Soto. In “Abstraction and Venezuelan Figuration XX Century” we can see the great diversity and richness of styles present in this selection of artists and works. At the same time this exhibition glimpses the formal and content characteristics that have stood out in the individual trajectories of each of these painters and sculptors. Characteristics that distinguish the aesthetic face, both of Figuration and of Abstraction in Venezuela, within the Latin American artistic context after World War II.