Jesus Rafael Soto

JESÚS RAFAEL SOTO (Venezuela, 1923 - France, 2005).
Untitled, ca. 1992, from the Suite Olympic Centennial.
Silkscreen on Vélin d'Arches paper, copy 171/250.
Signed and dated in pencil in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 63 x 90 cm.
Venezuelan artist formed in the School of Art of Caracas, Jesús Soto was an outstanding representative of the kinetic art, which he initiated and developed at the end of the fifties. Between the seventies and the nineties, already fully consecrated at the international level, he held important exhibitions in places such as the MOMA and the Guggenheim in New York, the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, etc. He also participated in the 1966 Venice Biennial and the 1996 São Paulo Biennial. Especially famous for his penetrable sculptures, he also carried out projects such as the decoration of the main hall of the Teresa Carreño Theater in Caracas. Soto was awarded Venezuela's National Plastic Arts Prize, and in 1973 the Venezuelan government inaugurated a museum in his honor in his native Ciudad Bolivar. He is currently represented in important collections such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
The Olympic Suite is composed of 50 lithographs and serigraphs chosen to represent various contemporary artistic trends. It was published to commemorate the first centenary of modern Olympism. The artists chosen are defined by diverse movements and pictorial currents, from the conceptualism and minimalism of "Ben" Vautier, the lyrical abstraction of Yasse Tabuchi, the painting of Oleg Tselkov who concentrates on the human figure, intensely expressive and treated with forceful forms and intense colors that seek to reflect the conflicts and violence of his time, and finally the work of André Arabis, clearly abstract and geometric.