Carlos Cruz Diez

CARLOS CRUZ DIEZ (Caracas, 1923 - Paris, 2019).
Tapestry
It has an informative label on the back.
Needs cleaning.
Signed in the lower right area.
Measurements: 240 x 170 cm.
The French-Venezuelan artist, Carlos Cruz-Diez was one of the most relevant protagonists of the optical and kinetic art, artistic current that claims "the awareness of the instability of the real". His research reveals him as one of the thinkers of color in the 20th century. The plastic discourse of Carlos Cruz-Diez gravitates around the chromatic phenomenon conceived as an autonomous reality that evolves in space and time, without the help of form or support, in a continuous present. He began his artistic training in 1940, studying at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y aplicadas, where he later became a professor. During his time as a student, he began to collaborate with publications such as La Esfera, where his comic drawings were shown. In 1944, he worked as an illustrator and graphic designer for the magazine El Farol, as well as for other publications. Two years later he became the creative director of the McCaan-Erickson advertising agency. In 1954 he began working on mural projects, in which he showed his interest in color, abstraction and geometry, which were exhibited at the XV official Salon. A year later he moved to Barcelona, visited Paris and in 1956, he exhibited his work at the Buchholz Gallery in Madrid. After traveling to New York and Paris, he returned to Caracas, where he founded the Estudio de Artes Visuales, dedicated to industrial design. A studio where he developed work that would influence his later series, such as Couleur Additive and Physichromie (Physichromia). Based on the color field current represented by Kenneth Noland and Op art. Mainly abstract current, which is based on the pictorial composition of purely optical phenomena, seeking the sensation of movement on a two-dimensional surface, deceiving the eye through complex optical illusions. Repetition structures with a clear order are used, based on rigorous scientific principles in order to produce unprecedented visual effects. In this case the principles of Op Art are put at the service of figuration, using the repetition of geometric shapes and the juxtaposition of flat colors. In 1960 he returned to Paris, definitively, and a year later he participated in the exhibition Bewogen Beweging at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam where artists such as Allan Kaprow, Alexander Calder, Moholy-Nagy, Robert Rauschenberg, Jean Tinguely, Marcel Duchamp, Victor Vasarely also collaborated. In 1965 he participated in The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, an exhibition that was the official consecration of kinetic art.