Oswaldo Vigas (1923 – 2014), a protean creative spirit who became what many consider to be one of Latin America’s most important modernist artists, Oswaldo Vigas drew on an unusually broad range of styles and ideas in his work. He explored a diversity of influences that served his ongoing search into his mestizo identity. Cubism, Surrealism, Constructivism, informalism, and Nee-Figuration are all employed in his work in a personal way, while he remained faithful to his own convictions and created a body of work containing imagery that is both authentic and unique. In 1952, Vigas relocated to Paris for a twelve-year stay, there, he encountered some of the era’s most important artists, movements, and ideas, and was a key player in the city’s legendary “avant-garde” scene.

He was a frequent participant in the prestigious Salon de Mai, along with Jean Arp, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Wifredo Lam, Fernando Leger Rene Magritte, Henri Matisse, Roberto Matta, Pablo Picasso, among others. In 1964, he returned to Venezuela, where he settled and continued to work untiringly until his death in 2014 at the age of 90.

Vigas’ work has been showcased in more than a hundred solo exhibitions, and evidence of his oeuvre is present in numerous institutions as well as in public and private collections worldwide, as well as in major auction houses like Sotheby’s and Christie’s which has reported excellent results and an undeniable upward trend. A major anthological exhibition has been traveling throughout the most important museums of the Americas since 2014.