Jesús Rafael Soto
Jesús Rafael Soto ( born June 5, 1923 in Ciudad Bolivar, Venezuela, † January 14, 2005 in Paris, France) was a Venezuelan painter and sculptor. From 1950 he lived and worked in Paris and Caracas and was since the sixties one of the most important representatives of kinetic art and Op Art in South America and Europe.
Life and work
Jesús Rafael Soto studied 1942-1947 at the Art School Escuela de Artes y Artes Plásticas Aplicadas in Caracas. After graduation, he headed until 1950, the small art school Escuela de Artes Plásticas in Maracaibo. He experimented with optical illusions and visual tricks of Op Art in the style of Victor Vasarely. In 1950 he went to Paris and began to deal with serial art. This includes his work " repetition ", " progression" and "Serial". He also worked with three-dimensional effects, which he produced on flat surfaces.
In the 1960s he focused on structural and optical effects. He created objects of iron wire and wood, which he called " vibration Pictures" called. This " vibration Pictures" consisted of thin, arranged in rows pendulum rods that were attached before finely striped, flat surfaces. Examples are his images vibration "Vibration picture with black rod ", " Vibration ", " vibrating screen with green- black grid " or " writing". The arrangement of the wires and the strips on the surface depending on the angle showed a different visual effect and produced the viewer almost hypnotic effects when it moved in front of the image. Some of his "Vibration pictures " were shown in 1964 at the documenta III in Kassel in the Department of light and movement.
Later Soto created objects, which he called " Penetrables " in which the viewer becomes part of the art was. The Penetrables consisted partly of large cubes or suspended nylon tubes, which should pass through the viewer. Some generated when traversing metallic resonances through specially mounted tubes made of aluminum.
Jesús Rafael Soto also created murals among others in 1957 in the University of Caracas, 1968 in the University of Rennes, 1971, installation at the Deutsche Bundesbank in Frankfurt am Main or 1973 in the Central Bank in Caracas.
His works have been shown in a number of exhibitions around the world, including at the Kunsthalle Bern (1968), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York ( 1974), in Quadrat Bottrop (1990 ), in Madrid (1992) and are worldwide in public collections, including the Museum of Concrete Art in Ingolstadt or at Il Giardino di Daniel Spoerri.
His home town of Ciudad Bolívar honored him with a museum that was built with him and the architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva and opened in 1973 Museo de Arte Moderno Jesús Soto.
Exhibitions
Literature and sources
- Documenta III. International Exhibition; Catalogue: Volume 1: Paintings and Sculpture; Volume 2: Hand drawings; Volume 3: Industrial design, graphic; Kassel / Cologne 1964.
- Wieland Schmied: Jesus Raphael Soto, catalog of the exhibition at the Kestner - Gesellschaft in Hannover in 1968.