🎨 Artistic space #22 - Alejandro Otero and kineticismsteemCreated with Sketch.

in #art5 years ago (edited)

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Alejandro Otero

Born in Manteco (Edo. Bolívar) on March 7, 1921.
Died in Caracas on August 13, 1990.


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Notable painter, draftsman, sculptor and writer. Son of José María Otero Fernández and María Luisa Rodríguez. His childhood was spent in the Upata and then moved to Caracas where he studied at the School of Plastic Arts and Applied Arts. While still a student, he was named professor of the course of Plastic Experimentation for children (1942) and two years later professor of the Chair of Stained Glass in this institution, from which he graduated in December 1944. In 1945 he moved to Paris, where he lived intermittently until 1964. There he broadened his knowledge at the Sorbonne School of Higher Studies; and under the influence of Pablo Picasso, he began his trajectory towards abstraction. He also studied in the United States.


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Higher studies abroad

In 1946 he began the series of works known as Cafeteras where he represented the process of abstraction of an object until only leaving visible its basic structure. The coffee machines break and displace the pictorial tradition of their predecessors, the whole formation of Otero as a painter became immediately a remote past. In 1948 he exhibited this work in Paris, and the following year he returned to Caracas, where his French production was exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, the Free Art Workshop and the Pedagogic Institute of Caracas.


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He returned to Paris and together with other artists edited the magazine Los Disidentes, around which a group of the same name was articulated. He led this group, whose performance was the cornerstone of Venezuelan abstract art. Since they rejected the traditional forms used by the national art schools and promoted new abstract currents, thus approaching geometric abstractionism. Years later he returned to Venezuela and participated in the collective experience of the "Synthesis of the Major Arts" organized by the architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva in the spaces of the University City of Caracas. For which he made four murals and a stained-glass window for the Faculty of Engineering, a Polychromy for the Faculty of Pharmacy and another for the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism. Before his participation in Villanueva's project, Otero had made five mosaic and aluminum panels for the José Ángel Lamas Amphitheater in Caracas, two of whose mosaics already show the principles of Colorhythms; as well as Reflecting Mast and the Panel in mosaic and aluminum.


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Since 1967 he had begun to carry out a series of Spatial Structures, formed by a series of works of great size carried out out outdoors located in emblematic zones of diverse cities of the country, like Maracay, Caracas and Ciudad Bolívar, as well as in other international capitals: Bogota, Washington, Mexico or Milan. These structures, preferably made of aluminum, masterfully integrate the movement and light effects produced by the reflection of the material. In 1971, the Governorate of the State of Bolivar created the Alejandro Otero Annual Painting Salon and that same year obtained a scholarship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, with which he joined the Center for Advanced Visual Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). There he continued his research on monumental civic sculptures.


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Successful Works

In 1976, on the occasion of the bicentennial of U.S. independence, the Venezuelan government offered the sculpture Delta Solar to the United States. It was installed in the west garden of the Air and Space Museum in Washington. In 1977, Otero participated in a project conceived by the Olivetti Corporation to pay homage to Leonardo da Vinci in which he presented his Solar Structure, a parallelepiped with 54 blades and more than 10 meters high. The work was installed in the courtyard of honor of Castello Sforzesco in Milan, and in 1980 it was permanently placed in the Olivetti Palace in Ivrea, Italy.


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In 1979 he illustrated the book by Orlando Araujo, Alejandro Otero, the boy who reached the sun, and in 1982 he participated in the XL Venice Biennale. There he presented himself with different works and two structures, Abra Solar and Aguja Solar, which were installed at the entrance of the Biennial and in Lido. From this experience the filmmaker Ángel Hurtado made the videos Alejandro Otero in Venice and Abra Solar and the four seasons. The following year, the structures that participated in the Venice Biennale were installed in Plaza Venezuela in Caracas and in Guayana City. In 1985 the Museum of Contemporary Art of Caracas held the largest retrospective of his work including works from all stages of his plastic production. In 1986 the Solar Tower was installed in the Raúl Leoni Hydroelectric Complex in Bolívar State and the following year he joined the IBM Research Center in Venezuela where he experimented with the design of computer works and the results were published two years later in the book Alejandro Otero: Saludo al siglo XXI (Alejandro Otero: Saludo al Siglo XXI). In 1987 he was paid homage on the occasion of the First Biennial of Art of Guyana at the Jesús Soto Museum of Modern Art, to which he donated works for his collection.


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