Hector Poleo

HÉCTOR POLEO (Caracas, Venezuela, 1918 - 1989).
"I invest your certain fire", 1981.
Acrylic on canvas.
Signed in the lower right corner. Titled, dated and located (Paris) on the stretcher frame.
Measurements: 73 x 60 cm; 93 x 80 cm (frame).
After attending the Academy of Fine Arts of Caracas from 1930 and making his first individual exhibition in 1937, Héctor Poleo obtained a governmental scholarship to travel to Mexico in 1938. In Mexico City, he entered the San Carlos Academy and discovered the works of muralist and social realist artists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco. He held an exhibition in Mexico City in 1940 and then traveled to the United States. He returned to Caracas, where he exhibited at the Museo de Bellas Artes in 1941, before traveling from Bogota to Quito through the Andean countries. In 1944 he moved to New York and from 1948 to 1959 to Paris. In 1949 he married the ceramist Adelita Rico, before returning to Caracas and settling permanently in Paris. Héctor Poleo participated in the Biennial of São Paulo in 1953 and in the Biennial of Venice in 1954. He made numerous individual exhibitions, in particular in the Museum of Fine Arts of Caracas in 1941, 1946, 1950 and 1974, in Washington in 1945 and 1948, in the Museum of Modern Art of Mexico City in 1974 and in the Venezuelan Embassy in Paris in 1978. He made a mural for the University City of Caracas, stained glass windows for the Simón Bolívar International Airport in Maiquetía and for the La Paz station and for the Bolívar station of the Paris subway. Héctor Poleo also created two commemorative medals for the bicentennial of Bolívar's birth and for UNESCO. From 1930 to 1937, Héctor Poleo's landscapes were initially structured around the legacy of Cézanne. In a second phase, from 1940 to 1945, his painting focused more on the human figure, under the banner of social realism. After passing through a third, surrealist period, from 1945 to 1950, he devoted himself to neoplastic figuration until 1960. From 1960 until his death, Héctor Poleo's work develops a poetic figuration or, as Miguel Ángel Asturias says, a figurative abstraction that sometimes borders on the non-figurative.