Sicardi Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in Expo Chicago. Located at Booth 605, the gallery will present an exhibition of important works by gallery masters and mid-career artists from Argentina, Venezuela, and Mexico. These include Antonio Asis, Mariano Dal Verme, León Ferrari, Pablo Siquier, and Luis Tomasello (Argentina); Thomas Glassford and Gabriel de la Mora (Mexico); and Carlos Cruz-Diez (Venezuela).
Spanning the second half of the 20th century to the present, these artists exemplify the dynamic visual approaches to form that have characterized the avant-gardes that emerged in post-war Latin America. Each of these artists uses diverse materials to challenge conventions of representation and perception.
Considered one of the founders of the kinetic art movement, Paris-based artist Cruz-Diez’s Physichromies address the viewer's visual experience of light and color as they exist in space, over time. Asis's paintings of circles explore rhythm and the optical effects of pattern, in meticulous compositions. Ferrari’s elegant sculptures and works on paper prod the boundaries between the written word and conceptual art, while Tomasello’s wall pieces bridge painting and sculpture in subtle explorations of light and shadow, color and shape.
The exhibition pairs works by these masters with significant works made by a younger generation of artists: born in Texas and based in Mexico, Glassford uses a diverse range of everyday materials to create architectural or installation-scale projects, transforming found materials into images reminiscent of Minimalist sculpture and Op Art painting of the 1960s. Trained in architecture, de la Mora creates objects that evoke a balance between concept and chance; his drawings and sculptures made of human hair are at once intricate, ethereal, and playful. Siquier’s large-scale, maze-like drawings are suggestive of architecture’s spatial dimensions, while they also evidence the delicacy of the handmade. Dal Verme's gravity-defying graphite and paper constructions underscore a tension between architectural precision and the materials of drawing.
Seen together, works in the exhibition offer visitors to Expo Chicago a chance to experience the conceptual and visual interplay between canonical and mid-career artists from Latin America, each of whom makes important interventions into the major transnational currents of contemporary artistic practice.