Manuel Espinosa

Sicardi Gallery is pleased to present Manuel Espinosa: Paintings and Works on Paper, 1960s and 1970s. The exhibition is the Argentine modernist’s second solo exhibition in the United States, and it features Espinosa’s vibrant abstract paintings in oil and acrylic as well as his works on paper from his most prolific period of experimentation and creative production. The show opens on Thursday, April 4, with a cocktail reception from 6 to 8 pm.

Espinosa (1912-2006) was a founding member of the Asociación de Arte Concreto-Invención (AACI), which also included artists Tomás Maldonado, Alfredo Hlito, and Raúl Lozza. Founded in 1945, the group sought to develop a visual language for a post-war, industrial world. Their work broke from the figurative tradition, focusing instead upon geometric elements and color. “The artistic era of the representational fiction has reached its end,” they proclaimed in a 1946 manifesto.

After the group dissolved, Espinosa’s work continued to resonate with concrete art being made across international boundaries in the 1950s and 1960s; in those decades, he traveled repeatedly to Europe, where he met members of the De Stijl movement and artists in the Italian groups Movimento di Arte Concreta and Forma. During this period, he embraced an idea proposed by Swiss architect Max Bill, who believed that the practice of creating variations upon a theme could offer a systematic and precise understanding of a particular form. In his work of the 1960s and 1970s, Espinosa arranged squares and circles in serial patterns in his paintings and drawings. These variations investigate subtle effects of space and color, and explore optical sensations of depth and movement.