Eugenio Espinoza – Onceptuales
September 2–October 1, 2022
Reception 5–8pm Friday, September 2
The Anderson and VCUarts are pleased to present Eugenio Espinoza: Onceptuales, an exhibition of new and recent works by Venezuelan artist Eugenio Espinoza (b. 1950). Throughout a career spanning five decades, the grid has served Espinoza as a constant site and source of invention, interrogation and insurgency. Tirelessly contesting its meaning and authority, Espinoza makes the grid, along with its legacies and logic, accountable to human experience and a partner to our follies and vulnerabilities, humors and exuberance.
A student of Gego at the Instituto de Diseno Newmann-Inc in Caracas, Espinoza’s oeuvre began as a critical reaction to Modernism, especially in its Latin American and Venezuelan inflections. Responding to the institutional complicity of Concretismo and kinetic art in oil-rich 1960s and ‘70s Venezuela, Espinoza sought and forged a formal language which could interrupt the easy alliance between art and the establishment.
Onceptuales includes new, cut-canvas, wall-based works from a series by the same name. Other works, like those from the Collaterales series, remix and recombine sculptural and pictorial strategies from across Espinoza’s diversified practice. Large scale works such as Paso Doble (2022) and Transición Geométrica (Cubo Universal) (2007) continue Espinoza’s long standing interest in the artwork as site—a forum for social, architectural and phenomenological experience.
EVENTS
The exhibition, on view September 2–October 1, 2022, will be complemented by two Zoom conversations led by Art History Adjunct Assistant Professor Michael Panbehchi, PhD. One will be a talk with the artist on September 22nd while the other will feature Dr. Panbehchi in conversation with Sculpture + Extended Media Studies MFA Alumni Mariana Parisca on September 29th.*
*The Zoom talks have been canceled. A transcript of conversations with the artist will be shared at a later date.
The exhibition reception will be held 5–8pm Friday, September 2.
ARTIST BIO
Born in 1950 in the highlands of Venezuela, Eugenio Espinoza studied art at the Instituto de Diseno Newmann-Inc in Caracas, Venezuela; at Pratt Institute, New York University; and the School of Visual Arts in New York City, New York.
Notable group and solo exhibitions include: Sur Moderno: Journeys of Abstraction, MoMA, New York (2019); Good, Blue Day, Piero Atchugarry Gallery, Miami (2019); Human Applause, Bortolami Gallery, New York (2018); Raising the Curtain, Galeria Moises Perez de Albeniz, Madrid, Spain (2017); Permission to be Global, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, (2014).
Espinoza has been the subject of two retrospective exhibitions: Retro/Retrospective, 2016-1972, Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Spain (2016), and Unruly Supports (1970 to 1980), Perez Art Museum, Miami, (2015).
In 2017 Espinoza was the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Fine Arts.
Espinoza’s works are included in the permanent collections of Tate Modern, London, U.K.; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Fundacion Gego, Caracas; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Fine Arts Museum of Houston, Texas; the Blanton Museum, Austin, Texas; the Perez Art Museum Miami, Florida; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo in Sao Paulo; Museo de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro; the Cisneros-Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami; and many other prestigious private and public collections.
Poster designed by Bradley Sinanan.