Untitled, SZY #1

Stimulated by travel and encounters with the School of Paris and American Abstract Expressionism, Szyszlo pioneered lyrical abstraction in Peru in the mid-1950s. Eschewing the entrenched social realism of the contemporary Indigenist school, he found a guiding precedent in ancient Andean forms—woven and painted textiles, exquisite stone carving—admired for their complexity of color and geometric design. “To create a painting that is original, you have to bring it up from deep inside of you,” he observed. “It has to deal with your circumstance, your tradition, your heritage.” Szyszlo’s mature landscapes pay tribute to the spiritual richness and inheritance of the Inca through a sumptuous poetics of color, rendered in darkly luminous, dramatic compositions. Modern evocations of the Andean past, these two untitled prints assimilate ancient motifs—a ritual stone table, a curved blade or scythe—within abstracted, tonal arrangements of color and graphic line.

This text was created in collaboration with the University of Maryland Department of Art History & Archaeology and written by Abigail McEwen,