FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
NEMESIO ANTÚNEZ: Chilean Master
September 14 – November 11, 2017
Opening Reception, Thursday, September 14, 7:00 – 9:00pm
Tuesday - Saturday, 11am - 5pm
Couturier Gallery is proud to present “Nemesio Antúnez - Chilean Master” an exhibition of paintings and prints by the great Chilean artist. This exhibit of 26 paintings and prints from the 1940s through the 80s is an official presentation for the Getty-sponsored initiative Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. An illustrated catalog accompanies the exhibition. The opening reception, co-sponsored by the Consulate General of Chile in Los Angeles, will take place Thursday, September 14th, from 7-9pm and is open to the public. The show will continue through November 11.
Nemesio Antúnez (1918-1993), one of Chile’s most renowned artists, is respected as a painter, printmaker, humanitarian and champion of Chilean artists. He was the founder of the important graphic workshop Taller 99; twice director of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago (1969-73; 1990-93); and host of one of the very few plastic arts programs of Chilean television, Ojo con el arte (Eye On Art). Antúnez was an autodidactic artist who received formal training in architecture at Catholic University of Santiago and, as a Fulbright scholar, earned a Master’s degree in architecture from Columbia University, New York in 1945. While in New York in the 40s, Antúnez joined Stanley William Hayter’s legendary graphic arts workshop, Atelier 17, where Hayter introduced him to innovative printmaking techniques, he would later bring back to Chile and, in 1956, established the still-functioning Taller 99 to disseminate the new printing techniques he had acquired.
It is difficult to classify Antúnez as belonging to any traditional art movement. His work may be described as consolidating the heritage of geometric art and surrealism, two strong movements in the art of Latin America. A common thread throughout the majority of his paintings and prints is a national imagery incorporating the landscapes of the Andes, crowds of people, tango, sleepers, beds, kites, bicycles and cityscapes. The exception are the architectural cityscapes in which Antúnez depicts the enormity of the skyscrapers encountered during his stays in New York City, in the 1940s and again the 60s. In these paintings, Antúnez expresses the relationship between the overwhelming scale of these buildings and the people scurrying in the streets below these looming structures reducing them to the size of ants.
Several of the paintings in this exhibition belong to the New York period when Antúnez had been named the Chilean Cultural Attaché to the United States and in 1964 arrived in New York City for a five-year stay. It was one of his most intensely productive and mature periods. At this time Antúnez also hosted a weekly radio program focused on Latin American artists to which he invited artists from all over the region including the Colombian Fernando Botero; the Chilean artists Roberto Matta, Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau, and his close friend Pablo Neruda, the poet and Nobel Prize in Literature.
Another characteristic of Antúnez's paintings is his arrangement of space, depicting rectangular boxes superimposed or merging one with another, hovering in voids. He uses transparent planes and figures to create the illusion of endless expanses, a sense of infinity as might be experienced in the Andes or a multitudinous city. Minuscule anthropomorphic figures often populate these spatial configurations.
Nemesio Antúnez’s work is found in numerous museum and public collections worldwide including Austin Museum, Texas University, Austin, TX; Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH; Guggenheim Museum, NY; Instituto Hispano Americano, Madrid; Library of Congress, Washington D.C.; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago; Museo de Arte Moderno, Río de Janeiro; Museo de Arte, Moderno, Sao Paulo; Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico CdeM; Museo de Arte Moderno, Caracas; Museo de Arte Moderno, Bogotá; Museo de Bellas Artes, Montevideo; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Caracas; Museum of Art, Tel Aviv; Museum of Modern Art, NY; New York Public Library, NY; and the United Nations, NY.
For further information or visuals please contact the gallery: [email protected]
