Espace Meyer Zafra

Exhibitor's Artists:

• Yaacov Agam
  Detailed Description : Agam is one of the pioneer creators of the kinetic movement in art as well as its most outstanding contemporary representative. Agam studied art at the Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem. After arriving to Paris in 1951, at the age of 23 Agam held his first one man exhibition with a great success in 1953. This exhibition consisted totally of kinetic, movable and transformable paintings, which actually was the first one-man show in art history exclusively devoted to kinetic art. A passionate experimenter, Agam deals with such problems as the 4th dimension, simultaneity and time in the visual, plastic arts, and has extended his experiments to application in the fields of architecture, literature, music and art theory His works express a concept that breaks away with the established way of expressing reality in limited, static way. In his works, he strives to demonstrate the principle of reality as a continuous "becoming" rather than static “graven image”. His paintings "Double Metamorphosis II" in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and "Transparent Rhythms II" in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. give the best example of his polymorphic painting. His works are placed in many public places including "Communication x 9" on the Michigan Avenue in Chicago (1983), "Communication: Night and Day" at the AT & T building in New York (1974), "Super Lines Volumes" at the Parc Floral in Paris (1971), and his murals "Peace" and '`Life" are installed at the Parliament of Europe in Strasbourg (1977). Agam has expressed the new concepts in architectural monumental works as in his "Jacob's Ladder" which forms the ceiling of the National Convention House in Jerusalem. He created a "floating museum", including all the artworks in the public areas and cabins, for the Carnival Cruise Line's luxury cruise ship "Celebration" (l987). His fire-water fountain in Dizengoff Square in Tel Aviv (1986) streams water, fire, and

  

  Vision contrapuntique
• Cesar Andrade
• Marina Apollonio
• Antonio Asis
• Carlos Cruz Diez
  Detailed Description : Born in 1923 in Caracas, Venezuela, Carlos Cruz Diez is one of the main representative of kynetic movement, originated at the end of the 1940´s and related to Bauhaus school. Kynetic art is not only one more pictoric gender. It goes from beyond passive contemplation. It is about an alive and living artistic concept allowing appreciation of colour and shapes at each moment and, thus less frequent, intervention of the viewer in the artistic process. Kynetic art consists in the generation of movement because of the eye’s optical peculiarities. New visual factors are added such as: first, the distance that exists between the viewer and the work and the displacement of the person in front of the work. It also offers a real interaction between the created work and those who observe and appropriate itself during the moment of contemplation. Cruz Diez’s singularity relies in kynetic art’s same fundaments that, according to the artist, are directly associated through its connexions to space and time. Full of naturist and literary references, Cruz Diez tries, through his research, to modify the notions of plastic discourse that are colour, structure, and space. He tends to create a chromatic climax in continuous mutation and transform painting’s inherent to bidimensional nature into a frame of constant evolution. The artist’s proposal is clear. It consists in : “autonomouscolour, without anecdotes, lacking of symbols, as an evolutive fact that implicates us. Colour in constant mutation creates autonomous realities. Realities: because changes happen in space and time. Autonomous: because they make no reference to anything in nature”. Cruz Diez pursues to establish “a simple and direct communicative system which, with colour’s intermediation, will allow the viewer to discover and acknowledge its possibilities, its limits and where its connections with the work will not be reduced to mere interpretation of a code of symbols, as it happens w

  

  Induction du jaune série nov. 06-07

  
  Also exhibited by: Ninoska Huerta Gallery,
• Joao Galvao
  Detailed Description : Joao Carlos Galvao started his first studies in painting in 1951. He studied at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts of Brazil from 1964 to 1966, before settling in Paris for a few years to follow studies in art sociology under the guidance of Jean Cassou. Between 1966 and 1970, he frequented the studios of Sergio Camargo, Antonio Asis, Victor Vasarely and Yvaral. His first solo exhibition was held in Rio de Janeiro in 1972. Subsequently, he exhibited several times with the kinetic artists in Paris and also the MADI group. Galvao sculpts wood; preferably from his country. He sculpts reliefs and sometimes standing sculptures similar to totems. The spectator’s eye must understand these reliefs from every angle; angles which intertwine and overlap in a surprising sinuous movement. Between these round or cubic modules, cavities and three-dimensional ridges are created. Dense forms appear to multiply before our very eyes and jump out from the background of the work. The artist models his elements in concave or convex form and also in discs. The wood and acrylic paint give a perfectly smooth surface which invites the touch. The juxtaposition of his little pieces has become increasingly chaotic as his work has developed over the years. After the initial wood constructions - rigorously built repetitive structures – more intuitive reliefs appeared, imbued with a certain emotion which softened the strict geometrical rules. The artist has also produced a small amount of canvases and frescos which all have a geometric style leaning towards a certain lyricism.

  

  Relief Rouge Carmin
• Jaildo Marinho
  Detailed Description : Jaildo Marinho was born in Brazil in 1970. He has lived and worked in Paris since 1993, but divides his time between France, Brazil and the United States. He studied sculpture at the UFPE-PE in Brazil and became a teacher at the Atelier de Sculpture and the Fonderie d'Art of the City of Paris. In 1991, the Casa da Cultura de Pernambuco Recife offered him his first solo exhibition: he was barely 21 years old at the time. Since then, he has participated in numerous group exhibitions and had an annual solo exhibition dedicated to him. He thus realised a large sculptural project in 2004 at the historical library of the City of Paris and in 2012 at the Maison de l'Amérique Latine in Paris. His works have been acquired by many public and private collections around the world and won the Gold Medal at the International Festival of Mahares in 1995 and 3rd prize for sculpture at the Biennale of Malta in 1999. Jaildo Marinho began working on materials in his childhood, to become a sculptor. But it was a revelation, shortly after his arrival in Paris in 1993, which marked his artistic tendencies forever. He came to realise the potential of emptiness. The concept of emptiness is essential in the work of Jaildo Marinho. Thanks to subtle work using geometric shapes and colour, his marble sculptures defy the laws of gravity. Between fullness and emptiness a range of variations and metamorphoses develop. He seeks to make sense of what is unseen. His works appear initially as simple, hard, almost inaccessible blocks. Then with his sculptor’s hands, he carefully digs away and then encloses the empty space in a geometric shape; in a kind of sculptured shell. To further develop this work on emptiness, Jaildo Marinho turned to marble, Carrara marble from the homeland of all sculptors. He loves both purity and white, which offer him so many possibilities and captures the much sought-after light. The heavy appearance and burdensome weight of the marble are swept away by the scul

  

  Navete
• Manfredo Massironi
• Manuel Merida
  Detailed Description : A native of Venezuela, Manuel Mérida was born in 1939. He studied at the school of Fine Arts Valencia, Venezuela from 1950 through 1958. In his early career, he was in the studio of Carlos Cruz-Diez, the noted kinetic artist, where he developed his concepts of space and movement and confirmed his interest in the material and gestural aspects of this art. He has also had a widely varied career as a visual artist, working as a scenographer in both theater and film; he also worked on advertising for Christian Dior, Guerlain, Cartier, Chanel, American Express and Madame Figaro. Mérida seeks to avoid proposing a fixed and unique vision by playing with the variations of the colored materials (pigments, sand, coal powder, wood particles and painted metal) contained in his monochromes. His works are always mobile and their forms, dimensions and colors are always different. Square or circular in form, protected by a glass plate, his pieces turn around a central axis. Some are powered by a manual rotor; their revolutions abruptly activated by the hand of the spectator. Other pieces are motorized to move slowly. Every movement creates a new, unexpected monochrome; with each rotation, the organic matter contained in Merida’s sculptures presents an infinitely different form. Mérida uses the potentialities of fate to create a work in perpetual transformation. The images shaped by the material in rotation have a hypnotizing effect on the viewer. Espace Meyer Zafra has exhibited the work of Manuel Mérida since 2001. Mérida’s works are also represented in private and public collections in France, United States, United Kingdom and Switzerland.

  

  Cercle Quadrillé Blanco Black

  

  Grand cercle bleu outremer
• Matilde Perez
• Dario Perez Flores
  
  Also exhibited by: Ninoska Huerta Gallery,
• Pancho Quilici
  Detailed Description : Pancho Quilici was born in 1954 in Caracas, Venezuela. He studied at the French College and the School of Architecture. He renounced quickly to this orientation in favor of sculpture and silk-screen. Attracted by the three-dimensional drawing, he continued his studies while performing sculptures in the manner of Tinguely, from scrap metal. In 1978, he received the diploma of the Neumann Foundation, then he followed courses silkscreen at CEGRA. He had his first solo exhibition in 1979 in Caracas (Minotauro Gallery), encouraged by the art critic Roberto Guevara. As he represents it, the universe of Quilici is situated between heaven and earth, between an imaginary cosmos and the vast expanses of his native country. It is an uninhabited world, cold, but from where there emerges no hostility. Nothing happens there, and however this “non-place” looks like our dreams and we expect that this fixed scenery is brought to life. His paintings with sweet colors, varying between green water and blue striped, of unusual geometric structures, reinforce the strangeness and poetry of these infinite spaces. Freedom-loving, Pancho Quilici’s artworks are deployed in space, mixing techniques and crossing temporalities. The thick material, chaos, magma, sediment of a lost past, rubs against the lightness of a clear sky, dawn of a new era, where we can imagine, perhaps, a city. The far away landscape is undecided, random as the future. His works show a vertiginous world in wich human figures are mere accessories. The artist doesn’t paint the human being but his movement, creating a beautiful landscape. Pancho Quilici is a great designer. He is mostly an exceptional inventor of conjectural proposals. He was awarded a great number of prizes in Venezuela and Paris. His work is already in the collection of many important private and public institutions.

  

  De même nature

  

  Non vérifié 3
• Francisco Salazar
  Detailed Description : Francisco Salazar, Venezuelan artist born in 1937, studied at the School of Fine arts in Caracas. From 1960 he became professor at the University of Architecture in Caracas. He moved to Paris in 1967. He was exhibited twice in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas, and especially in 1974 in a show entitled “Nine Venezuelan artists”. Francisco Salazar was included in several group shows in galleries, art fairs and biennales in Latin America, Asia and Europe. On the one hand, Francisco Salazar, former student of artist Alejandro Otero, has carried constant interest in the optical phenomena for more than fifty years. His work is mainly based on one geometrical figure, the square, and is dedicated to both light and the infinite variations given by the confrontation between the two elements of its works: pure white paint and corrugated cardboard. Aside from the visual effect, Salazar’s work tells also a conceptual story through his favorite material, cardboard, that he chooses for its banality and raises it up to an esthetic dimension, far away from its preconceived notion. Salazar works also with the light and puts it in order despite its free nature and dynamic. By ennobling the material, he is revealing an omnipresent game between light and shadow that play with the viewers’ field of vision and at the same time unveil multiple variations. Each art piece merges two different measures of time: the subjective measure, that is to say the viewer’s conscious as well as the monumental measure of natural light. The art piece that can be understood only from each consciousness is to be seen as a meditation, or an ever building phenomenological work.

  

  Deux carrés vides et un trou
• Shirley Shor
• Jesús Rafael Soto
  
  Also exhibited by: Hollis Taggart Gallery, Ninoska Huerta Gallery,
• Walter Strack
  Detailed Description : Walter Strack was born in 1936 to Swiss parents in France. He studied at the Kunstgewerbschule of Zurich (where Yaacov Agam also studied) under the supervision of Johannes Itten. In 1957, the Kiki gallery of Zurich gave him his first solo exhibition at the age of just 21. After his studies in Switzerland, he returned to France. In 1961, he was noticed by the American gallery Neufville where he exhibited his works alongside those of Ellsworth Kelly and Joan Mitchell. He represented Switzerland in 1966 at the Mostra Internationale d’Arte «Premio del Fiorino» in Florence. Since then, he has continued to exhibit in France and other European countries. His work was shown by L’Espace Meyer Zafra in the United States in 2013 during the Art Fair in Miami. His early tachiste style is influenced by American painting. Later, attracted by Pop Art, he develops highly colorful female figures before finally entering the art movement of the late sixties. Walter Strack channels colors into large flat surfaces: rectangles and squares separated by a thin groove animate the mounted canvas. The adjacent panels are arranged to form relief: either jutting out or indented. His precise assembly methods suggest other angles of approach. The differences in relief and overlaps highlight the shades of color. Without being strictly mathematical, his tableau-reliefs achieve a balance. The cut-out shapes, with their depth and half-tones of color generate numerous contrasts and and great harmony. Thus, as stated in 2008 by Gérard Xuriguera, critic and art historian: “whether viewed from above or below, the complementary surfaces carefully dissected according to a clear mental thought pattern, are arranged into a perfectly coherent whole. This emanates from the sure vision and thoughtful hand of the artist, who guarantees the exactitude of the divisions, the studied depth of the divided frames and the clarity of their surfaces before mounting the canvas and beginning work on the

  

  14-H-RO-58-120
• Rene Ugarte
• Ludwig Wilding