Object Notes

1956

This painting is Alejandro Obregón’s seminal work reacting to the violent turmoil of the Colombian civil war. Beginning in 1948, political and social chaos plagued the population of Bogotá and beyond, leaving as many as 250,000 dead.

Despite his success in abstraction, Enrique Zañartu rejected categorization with Chilean modernists and staunchly believed himself to be a realist. Working in the shadow of his younger brother, the print magnate Nemesio Antúnez, Zañartu took on the surname of his mother, divorcing himself from the fame received by the familial figurehead of modern Chilean art.

Chilean painter, engraver, and instructor Rodolfo Opazo Bernales has been an active figure in Latin American art since the 1950s. At that time, the majority of his contemporaries abandoned figural forms for abstraction; Opazo Bernales did the reverse.

Cosmic Landscape is one of Danilo di Prete’s first attempts at controlled gestural abstraction. The Italian native began painting in Brazil in 1946 and struggled professionally until winning a national painting prize at the inaugural São Paulo Biennial in 1951.

Along with many fellow Japanese in the 1930s, Manabu Mabe immigrated to southern Brazil as a young boy. During the day, Mabe and his family worked on the coffee plantations, and in the evenings he continued his Japanese education. His academic and literary training were critical to his formation as an artist, as demonstrated by his use of calligraphic brushstrokes in later works.

Apocalypsis marks a transition between Raquel Forner’s artistic exploration of human suffering and her optimistic and influential Space Series, begun in 1957. Here she shows disparate groups of people separated by rigid, abstract landforms.