Sculpture / Vision

Sicardi Gallery opens the 2016 season with a group exhibition of works by Antonio Asis (b. 1932, Argentina), Carlos Cruz-Diez (b. 1923, Venezuela), León Ferrari (1920-2013, Argentina), Iole de Freitas (b. 1945, Brazil), Julio Le Parc (b. 1928, Argentina), Francisco Sobrino (1932-2014, Spain), Jesus Rafael Soto (1923-2005, Venezuela/France) and Luis Tomasello (1915-2014, Argentina/France). The exhibition takes the idea of the sculptural form as its subject, including both two- and three-dimensional works that bear a sculptural relationship to space and the viewer. With their dynamic relationship to light, line, color, reflection, and space, the works on view activate the viewer, requiring her or him to move around the room, to take in the work from multiple vantage points, and to engage with its spatial propositions.

Sculpture / Vision pairs represented artists Asis, Cruz-Diez, Ferrari, Le Parc, Sobrino, Soto, and Tomasello with the gallery’s first presentation of work by Iole de Freitas. Seen together, these works create a conversation between two- and three-dimensions. Kinetic maestro Carlos Cruz-Diez’s Physichromie Panam 218 (2015), for example, exists as a two-dimensional object, but its complex construction extends its presence out into the gallery space: to see the geometric forms embedded in the changing colors of the Physichromie, the viewer has to walk back and forth, changing vantage points often. The work exists fully in space, even as its physical structure is two-dimensional. De Freitas’s Untitled (2010), a sculpture made from etched polycarbonate and stainless steel has its roots in her study of design and architecture. Her recent sculptures consider the body and its movements in space. For Untitled, the artist’s choice of industrial materials highlights the sparingness with which she uses line to suggestively indicate movement—the sculpture could be considered a kind of drawing-in-space.