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Article

Arnal, Luis Eduardo  

Venezuelan, 20th – 21st century, male.

Active in France.

Born 6 March 1947.

Painter.

Neo-Constructivism.

Luis Arnal studied at the school of fine arts in Caracas and then in Paris at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and the University in Paris. He exhibits mainly in Venezuela. Arnal is a self-declared Constructivist and this is borne out in the technical rigour of his pieces and the phenomenological games he plays with contrasting, bright colours. He uses almost exclusively curves and counter-curves....

Article

Carter, John  

British, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1942, in Hampton Hill (Middlesex).

Sculptor, painter.

Constructivism.

John Carter studied at Twickenham School of Art from 1958 and at Kingston School of Art until 1963. He was awarded a Leverhulme Travelling Scholarship to study at the British School at Rome. He taught at London College of Printing, Hornsey College of Art, Colchester Institute, Reading University, Wimbledon School of Art and Chelsea College of Art and Design from ...

Article

Chagnon, Louis  

French, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 23 September 1955, in Paris.

Painter, collage artist, illustrator. Landscapes, nudes.

Neo-Constructivism.

Louis Chagnon taught history and geography from 1987 to 1995, before taking up painting full-time. He was awarded the Prix Artcolle at the 6th Salon de Collage Contemporain, in Paris in ...

Article

Colares, Raymundo  

Aleca le Blanc

(b Grão Mogol, Minas Gerais State, April 25, 1944; d Montes Claros, Minas Gerais State, March 28, 1986).

Brazilian painter. Colares worked in Rio de Janeiro during the country’s military dictatorship (1964–85), his work synthesizing the Constructivist sensibilities of Brazil’s Concrete artists of the 1950s with the rapidly expanding urban visual culture of Rio de Janeiro. Originally from a small rural town, Colares moved to Rio de Janeiro to study art in 1965 at the age of 21. He became acquainted with young avant-garde artists such as Antonio Manuel (b 1947), Antônio Dias, and Hélio Oiticica, and participated in the landmark exhibition Nova objetividade brasileira at the Museu de Arte Moderna in 1967.

Having rejected his civil engineer training, he dedicated his attention to courses at the Escola de Belas Artes and Ivan Serpa’s influential Open Studio at the Museu de Arte Moderna. There he learnt about the European avant-garde and figures such as Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian, and Giacomo Balla, who became important aesthetic reference points. In an interview with curator Frederico Morais, he stated, ‘the painting that most influenced me was Nude Descending a Staircase by Marcel Duchamp’. Colares translated the dynamism and structure of the European tradition into his own large paintings that depicted the bright colours, high velocity, and multitude of buses constantly moving through Rio’s urban centre. The compositions took on a geometric format and Colares painted representations of fragments of the vehicles—headlights, body, and grilles—into the discrete spaces of the configuration, frequently in the form of a grid. That Colares only captured a snippet of the bus re-enacts the pedestrian’s visual experience; as they hurtle by at high speed, one can only comprehend a fraction of the vehicle before it has passed. Colares executed these by applying industrial paint to aluminium panels, creating a shiny and blemish-free image of urban life. And while this approach to the serial repetition of consumer culture creates an obvious visual link to the contemporaneous Pop art movement in the USA, Colares’ paintings cannot be divorced from the circumstances of the military dictatorship in Brazil, which legalized surveillance and censorship. Although not overtly political, it is impossible to know whether these paintings celebrate or criticize life in Rio de Janeiro. Many artists working in Brazil at the time created works with similar interpretive ambiguity, a mechanism by which one could potentially insert veiled political criticism and still avoid punishment....

Article

Crowley, Graham  

Marco Livingstone

(b Romford, Essex, May 3, 1950).

English painter, draughtsman and illustrator. After studying in London at St Martin’s School of Art (1968–72) and at the Royal College of Art (1972–5), Crowley began painting in a playful post-Cubist idiom. In works such as So and Sew (1980; see 1983 exh. cat., p. 4) he addressed himself for the first time to the subject of the domestic interior, which was to remain a prime concern. The comically charged and manic atmosphere of this early work, in which the excessive energy of a seamstress’s actions seems to have exploded the figure into its constituent elements, still draws on the elements of abstraction and schematization of Crowley’s painting of the mid- to late 1970s; the flatness that had characterized the earlier works, however, has here given way to strongly modelled, volumetric forms contained within a strongly recessive space. It was as Artist-in-Residence to Oxford University in the ...

Article

Dias, Antonio  

Elena Shtromberg

(b Campina Grande, Paraíba, 1944; d Aug 1, 2018).

Brazilian multimedia artist. After a nomadic childhood Dias arrived in Rio de Janeiro at the age of 14. Shortly after, he studied printmaking with the master engraver Oswaldo Goeldi at his workshop in the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes. Traces of his background in printmaking are visible in his use of text and adherence to a rigorous geometry throughout his oeuvre, most apparent in a series of graphic paintings such as Project for an Artistic Attitude (1970) and The Hardest Way (1970). In 1966, a scholarship from the French government took Dias to Paris, where he resided until 1968. Later he moved to Milan where he lived, on and off, for many years, with extended stays in New York, Nepal, and Germany. This itinerant existence and the condition of exile is referred to in the titles of such works as the gridded painting Anywhere is My Land...

Article

Herrera, Octavio  

Venezuelan, 20th – 21st century, male.

Active in France from 1977.

Born 1952, in Campo Carabobo.

Painter.

Neo-Constructivism.

Grupo Madí.

Octavio Herrera has exhibited since 1980 and since 1990 with the Grupo Madí, notably in 1997 at the Abstraction-Intégration touring exhibition in the Essonne.

Article

Holmstrand, Cajsa  

Swedish, 20th – 21st century, female.

Born 1951.

Painter, draughtswoman.

Neo-Constructivism.

Holmstrand lives and works in Stockholm. She participated in the exhibition Art Construit. Current Trends in France and Sweden ( Art construit- Tendances actuelles en France et en Suède), at the Centre Culturel Suédois, Paris, in ...

Article

Leal, Paulo Roberto  

Brazilian, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1946.

Painter.

Neo-Constructivism.

Paulo Leal is a Neo-Constructivist.

Article

Major, Kamill  

Hungarian, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 20 February 1948, in Perkáta.

Painter.

Kamill Major studied at the college of fine arts in Pécs before moving to the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. He helped to found a group based on Constructivist thinking. His painting, which is based on Constructivism, uses serial repetitions of similar elements. He showed his works in Pécs until ...

Article

Mayne, Thomas  

Benjamin Flowers

[Thom]

(b Waterbury, CT, Jan 19, 1944).

American architect and educator. Mayne trained at the University of Southern California (BA 1968) and Harvard (MArch 1978) and his work is influenced by the twin traditions of Russian Constructivism and Postmodern deconstruction. Many of his buildings grapple with both questions of form (in particular its relation to program) and the shifting nature of materials. He, along with Frank O(wen) Gehry, is among the best known of a generation of West Coast architects to emerge from the turbulent social and cultural milieu of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

As a young boy Mayne moved with his mother to Whittier, CA, where he was, by his own account, something of a loner and a misfit. Mayne matriculated at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, but soon transferred to the University of Southern California whose faculty at the time included Craig Ellwood, Gregory Ain and Ralph Knowles. After completing his bachelor of architecture in ...

Article

Montage  

Tom Williams

Term that refers to the technique of organizing various images into a single composition in both film and visual art. It is also frequently applied to musical and literary works that emphasize fragmentation and paratactic construction. In film, the term typically refers to the organization of individual shots to create a larger structure or narrative. This technique was developed most systematically by the film makers of the 1920s Russian avant-garde such as Sergey Eisenstein (1898–1948), Lev Kuleshov (1899–1970), and Vsevolod Pudovkin (1893–1953). In visual art, the term refers to the juxtaposition of disparate images in Collage and particularly Photomontage. Although this use of montage has a number of historical precursors, it was developed primarily in the 1910s and 1920s by artists associated with Dada, Surrealism, and Russian Constructivism such as George Grosz, John Heartfield, Hannah Höch, and Aleksandr Rodchenko. During the period after World War II, the technique became an increasingly routine practice in both advertising and the fine arts. In the late 20th century it has been most associated with the work of such figures as ...

Article

Perrot, Antoine  

French, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1953, in Toulon.

Painter.

Neo-Constructivism.

Perrot is active in Meudon, near Paris. His abstraction has developed as a series of combinations of polyhedral forms based on the interaction of the molecules in lead, in which there is random oxidation, and clear colours. The series ...

Article

Ridell, Torsten  

Swedish, 20th – 21st century, male.

Active also active in France.

Born 1946, in Malmö.

Painter, sculptor, engraver.

Neo-Constructivism.

Torsten Ridell studied at the Forum school of fine arts in Malmö and at Paris University VIII/ Vincennes. He lives and works in Paris and Malmö. Since the 1960s, his artistic activity has taken a concrete, constructive direction. To show space and its implications, he paints lines or strips, generally black or white, forming abstract figures seen as a reduction of the elements of an image. His art tends logically towards serial development....

Article

Schmitt, François  

French, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 11 April 1959, in Neuilly-sur-Seine.

Painter, performance artist.

Neo-Constructivism.

François Schmitt graduated from high school in 1977 and went on to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris (1983-1985) and the École des Beaux-Arts in Nîmes. In ...

Article

Smet, Yves de  

Belgian, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1946, in Ghent.

Painter.

Yves de Smet won the grand prize of the Association Belge des Critiques d'Art in 1977. He teaches at the Académie St-Lucas in Ghent. He moved from Constructivism to Conceptual Art.

Brussels (MAM)

Ghent (Stedelijk Mus. voor Actuele Kunst)...

Article

Sørensen, Margrete  

Danish, 20th – 21st century, female.

Born 1949.

Sculptor, draughtswoman.

Neo-Constructivism.

Margrete Sørensen lives and works in Copenhagen. Her highly diverse constructions are made of equally diverse materials, ranging from paper to wood. The meaning of her plastic sculptures is deliberately masked by the complexity of the components. She has participated in group exhibitions including: ...