AMA's Permanent Collection: Part II

“A green-and-red thi[n]g-amajig,” in the words of the Washington Post critic, Head exemplifies the colorful welded sculptures that Ferrer made during this time. Perched atop a red base encircled by a heavy chain, the whimsical, welded-metal “head” satirizes the mechanization of modern life, its green machine parts inanimate yet playfully anthropomorphic. Ferrer’s sculptures are “primarily adaptations of machinery to human form: typewriters and adding machines have been endowed with poetic wit and charm,” José Gómez Sicre wrote in the exhibition brochure. “They represent, however, a criticism of the mechanized attitudes assumed by human beings under the impact of an increasingly mechanical civilization.”

Along with Masacre - 10 de abril (1948) and La violencia (1962), The Dead Student—also known as The Vigil—is one of Alejandro Obregón’s most significant political works.

Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar’s oil paintings can be treated as precursors to his better-known volumetric reliefs and sculptures. Spending a significant amount of time in Paris in the early to mid-1950s, he soon abandoned the portraiture and expressionist style of his formative years in Colombia to assimilate a new postwar visual vocabulary of abstraction and geometry.

Panorama eléctrico by Peruvian artist Armando Villegas exemplifies a stylistic trend that emerged in the Andes after World War II. This new style drew inspiration from pre-Columbian forms as a means to distinguish Andean abstraction from both Indigenism, which preceded it, and from variants of abstraction, which had emerged in Europe and other parts of the Americas. Painted in subtle washes of greens and browns, Panorama eléctrico defies clear orientation.

Fugitive from a Mayan Lintel belongs to a body of work inspired by Rodolfo Abularach’s study of Mayan architecture and artifacts at the Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología in Guatemala. With the encouragement of Carlos Mérida, Abularach looked to the forms of pre-Columbian art in the late 1950s as a vehicle for modernist experimentation.

Cajamarca is part of a series of oil paintings under the same title, which, in Szyszlo’s words, narrates “a sort of glimpse of the execution of the last Inca, Atahualpa, by Francisco Pizarro.” In addition to the piece in the AMA collection, there are three other works in collections in Lima. “It was the first time,” stated Szyszlo, “that I had created a series of paintings trying to capture a feeling that was escaping me. I’ve created several series since, always trying to catch the painting that escapes. Painting is the murder of a dream.”

In this sculpture, Negret worked with organic shapes and the whole configuration recalls a living figure, a butterfly or a bird. The two main parts of the sculpture are allusive of wings and flight, which became an important feature in the later pieces of the Magic Machines.

Prior to her 1961 visit to Bolivia, María Luisa Pacheco began to experiment with abstract expressionism and art informel, and Composition is among her earliest forays into non-representational painting.

Equilibrium is an image that vacillates between abstraction and representation. On a background of thin washes of ochre, angular “rock” formations occupy the central portion of the canvas. From a gap in the craggy rock a small glowing orb suggests a setting sun aligned with the sacred landscape on the solstice. Balanced on the central blocky formation is a second smaller rectangular form in the upper right.

At the end of the 1950s, Rogelio Polesello introduced into his work various materials and techniques used in industrial production and the field of graphic design. Orange on Magenta is a painting made from layers of oil, applied on the canvas with a gun through metallic sheets with small circular perforations. The juxtaposition of the different layers of color produces an optical effect of reverberation.

With his intaglios, Omar Rayo opened up new possibilities for paper, a material he venerated and defined as “a two-sided god to carry the ideas of men.”

Guerrillero Muerto VIII was part of a solo exhibition that Armando Morales held at the Pan American Union between March and April 1962, and it belongs to a series of thirteen works created between the late fifties and early sixties.

The immediacy of Hurtado’s brushstrokes not only make his process clear but also create a sense of internal movement, as though the forms are in the process of change or transmutation. Hurtado saw these paintings as “inner landscapes” inspired by the “anxieties aroused by the barely known, the unsuspected, the unfamiliar, the utterly strange.”

Vicente Rojo’s experimentation with Spanish informalism was a relatively brief period of his career but significant in its break with the legacy of Mexican muralism. Like many Spanish artists of his generation, he looked to the example of Antoni Tàpies and his emphasis on materiality as a break with the tradition.

Enrique Tábara’s painting Superstition sits on the border between abstraction and figuration. In an extremely limited palette, Tábara renders a linear figure in gray and white against a black background. The figure consists of a central “face” that seems to be consuming a smaller figure with two beady eyes. Balancing on three fingers, its weighty form floats above the ground.