Historic master works by Wifredo Lam, Alejandro Obregón and Francisco Toledo top off the new exhibition, “Panorama Latinoamericano II,” at ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries in Coral Gables.
Art historians familiar with the 1959 oil on canvas by Lam—arguably one of the most historically significant Latin American artists—consider it an elegant example of the Cuban master’s Surrealism. The two-foot painting includes his characteristic “cheval” and several birdlike figures.
A 1982 Obregón canvas, painted with broadly sweeping gestures in flamboyant colors, features the Colombian master’s stylized condor against a backdrop of jagged mountains. One of the “big five” of Colombian master artists, Obregón often chose to paint the giant soaring birds as a metaphor for his homeland.
Two watercolors by Toledo, considered the most important living Mexican artist, are laden with anthropomorphized creatures from what art historian Dore Ashton calls his “unnatural natural history.” In her words, “Toledo is a true heir to a visionary tradition that never flinched from the bizarre.”
A small watercolor and gouache of a multicolored tree was painted by another Mexican master, the late Gunther Gerzso, when he was set designer at the Cleveland Playhouse between 1935 and 1941. ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries mounted the first major exhibition of this period of Gerzso’s early works, which were discovered by the collector’s daughter and put on the market only a few years ago.
Other painters and sculptors with works in the exhibition are “the masters of tomorrow,” according to gallery owner Virginia Miller, “with strong records of exhibitions in leading museums and galleries.”
Included are major works by Antonio Amaral and César Menéndez, leading artists from Brazil and El Salvador. Amaral’s glittering tubular swashes of kelly green swirl through a five-foot field of rose and peach elements and pale gray peaks. Menéndez, who had a one-person exhibition in 2004 at the Museum of Latin American art, has a six-and-a-half-foot oil featuring two female nudes astride muscular horses of a whirling carrousel.
Gina Pellón, a well-known Cuban artist who has lived in Paris for decades, is represented by a 1984 canvas of a woman in a rainbow of billowing, frothy clothes. Another Cuban artist who settled in Paris, Humberto Castro, has a pair of tall drawings depicting what critic Giulio V. Blanc termed “the elongated androgynous nudes that are his hallmark.”
Dominating one gallery wall are a series of four acrylic-on-canvas paintings by Michelle Concepción, a Puerto Rican painter whose subject matter resembles gauzy fabrics and stony asteroids.
Another wall is filled with six-foot and four-foot graphite-and-charcoal drawings by Hugo Crosthwaite, a 36-year-old artist from Tijuana. Crosthwaite, whose first major U.S. exhibition was at ArtSpace/Virginia Miller Galleries in 2005, had a six-foot drawing in the XII Bienal Rufino Tamayo, shown throughout Mexico in 2004-06.
Sergio Garval, whose apocalyptic visions are the subject of a four-foot oil on canvas and similar-sized charcoal drawing on panel, won the first prize of $50,000 at the Rafael Cauduro First Biennial of Drawings Competition of the Americas held in Tijuana, Mexico, in September for a similar charcoal work.
Another Mexican artist, Marianela de la Hoz, paints three-to-five-inch surrealistic figures in egg tempera. Her subjects are suggestive of a personal mythology, such as the man with a stag’s head titled “My Voice Rasps; I Feel Like A Man.”
The show includes two paintings by Alfredo Arcia, a Venezuelan artist whose enigmatic, theatrical scenes typify the term “magical realism.” The octagonal “Fall of Caracas” is within the artist’s hand-carved frame.
Also included in the exhibition are two of Irene Pressner’s “Rococomics” series, 28-inch-square encaustic works similar to the one that was awarded the $50,000 first prize last year in the first international juried competition at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California. The series incorporates cartoon characters like Dennis the Menace and Woody Woodpecker into elegant floral patterns.
Argüelles Mateo Pitt’s six-by-seven-foot panel juxtaposes scores of soccer fans in a mosaic-like pattern with several dogs similar to the three life-sized sculptures that accompany the painting.
The exhibit includes three other sculptures: A five-foot bronze by Maria Gamundi places a female nude reclining upon its own base. Melquiades, a leading Puerto Rican sculptor who prefers to use a single name, has a convoluted two-foot abstraction of pegged-together tropical woods. Linda Behar, a one-time civil engineer, incorporates contour maps and hand-cast glass elements into an imaginative 14-inch house.
The gallery is open during the week from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Friday and by appointment on Saturdays and evenings.
For more information on the artists and the exhibition, visit ,www.virginiamiller.com or call 305-444-4493.
