Ink on gessoed wood, copper wire, and ink on glass, in artist's painted wood frame
Not on view
This work belongs to a limited series of three–dimensional drawings Ferrari made in the early 1960s, retrospectively called Writings in the Air after the title of a book produced by the artist and his friend the poet Rafael Alberti in 1964. A boxlike object, Reflections is contained by two flat surfaces composed of intricate, abstract gestural ink lines on paper and glass. The wires contained within it reproduce the convoluted lines of the drawing at the back of the box, one of Ferrari's stylistic signatures of the 1960s. This three-dimensional duplication of a conventional drawing makes Reflections a material tautology. In that sense this work belongs to a very specific repertoire of Latin American Conceptual art that instead of producing art as ideas addresses material objects as concepts.
New Perspectives in Latin American Art, 1930–2006: Selections from a Decade of Acquisitions, November 21, 2007–February 25, 2008.
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León Ferrari
Argentine, 1920–2013 229 works onlineWhat is the political capacity of art? How should artists address injustice and violence? In 1965, the Argentine artist León Ferrari had a clear answer to these questions: “Art will be neither beauty nor novelty; art will be efficacy and agitation.
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Provenance
Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, New York, and Caracas
2007, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired as gift from Patricia Phelps de Cisneros.
Exhibition history
MoMA Exh. #2074: "Tangled Alphabets: Leon Ferrari and Mira Schendel", 6th Floor, The Rene d'Harnoncourt Exhibition Galleries, April 5 - June 15, 2009 and tour:
Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, November 24, 2009 - March 1, 2010
Porto Alegre, Fundacao Ibere Camargo, April 8 - July 11, 2010
MoMA Exh. #2135: "On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century", 6th Floor, The Joan and Preston Robert Tisch Gallery, November 21, 2010 - February 7, 2011
MoMA Exh. #2351: "From the Collection: 1960-1969", 4th Floor, The Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Painting and Sculpture Galleries, March 12, 2016 - March 19, 2017
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