
Jorge Salas

Jorge Salas
La Grita, Táchira state, Venezuela - 1954.In 1973, he entered the school of Architecture of the Central University of Venezuela (UCV) while studying painting with Professor Ángel Boscán. He left the university to attend the Cristóbal Rojas School of Plastic Arts, where he took painting and scu …
View more +In 1973, he entered the school of Architecture of the Central University of Venezuela (UCV) while studying painting with Professor Ángel Boscán. He left the university to attend the Cristóbal Rojas School of Plastic Arts, where he took painting and sculpture courses. In 1995 he did an internship at the Marble Laboratory in Pietra Santa, Italy.
In the late 1970s he had his first exhibitions, which raised great expectations for his work as a sculptor. He was part of “El Búho que masca chimó”, an avant-garde group formed together with three other sculptors. From that time on, his work was characterized by paying attention to the treatment of the surface and achieving reliefs that he made with carving, assembling and construction. He has worked under the constructivist and abstract-constructivist trends since the late 1980s. The former is developed by creating landscapes and still lives under concepts of space and time to achieve dynamic forms using blocks of wood and marble. The latter results from a construction of abstract segments that are juxtaposed by alternating the same natural materials of wood and stone to form a consolidated visual unit. Sometimes these works can emerge from a single block on which he writes and builds from geometries and textures, promoting multiple readings as a kind of document in stone.
The Tu y Yo series is based on complementary opposites and contain revealing elements of male and female symbology. As a tribute to his teacher Jesús Soto he introduces direct references to the work of the kinetics in hatched backgrounds of lines to produce the optical vibrations characteristic of that movement.
Among other recognitions, he received the Vicson Prize (1977), the University of Carabobo Prize at the Arturo Michelena Salón in Valencia (1981) and the CIANE Francisco Narváez National Prize (2016). His work is part of important public and private collections, including the Skironio Museum Polychronopoulos in Greece, the Los Angeles Museum of Latin American Art (MOOLA), the Andean Development Corporation (CAF) and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Caracas Sofia Imber. On an urban scale he has placed monumental works in El Paseo Vargas in Caracas, the Mario Abreu Museum in Maracay,the Luisa Cáceres de Arismendi Margarita Road Museum, and the Miami Dade County collection, among others.