Alejandro Otero

Alejandro Otero
Alejandro Otero
	Op Art, Geometric abstraction
Spouse	Mercedes Pardo
Awards	1940 - First prize in the First Venezuelan Official Art Salon / 1958: Otero was awarded the National Prize for Painting in the Official Salon / 1959:represented Venezuela in the Biennale of São Paulo, receiving an honourable mention

Alejandro Otero (El Manteco,

Los Disidentes

group.

Early life

Alejandro Otero studied art at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Artes Aplicadas de Caracas from 1939 to 1945. In 1940 he won a prize in the First Venezuelan Official Art Salon.^[2] After his studies, Otero traveled to New York and Paris where he focused his work on a revision of Cubism in 1945, living in Paris until 1952. In 1945 he also went to Washington, D.C., where he exhibited figurative works at the Pan American Union.^[2] He was married to Venezuelan artist Mercedes Pardo in London, 1951. Descendants: Mercedes Otero Pardo, Carolina Otero Pardo, Alejandro Otero Pardo and Gil Otero Pardo

Career

He produced some of his most important

Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas in 1949, these paintings caused a critical uproar in culturally conservative Venezuela, which ultimately, helped trigger the emergence of modernist abstraction in Venezuela.^[2] This works became well known in 1948 at an exhibition in Washington, D.C. since they served as a transition for Otero to overcome Realism

and start a new era for Venezuelan painting.

In 1950, Otero traveled in the

Kinetic Art

.

Drawn back to Caracas, he was invited to participate in the integration of the visual arts into the architectural program of the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas, a project directed and promoted by the architect

facades in glass mosaic

.

Between 1955 and 1960, he developed the extraordinary series of seventy-five Colorhythms, one of his major contributions to the field of painting. In 1955, Otero produced his first Colorhythm. Painted with

chromatic vibration, and rhythmic movement, the picture plane

seems to expand dynamically outwards. With the Coloryhthms, Otero proposed an idea of particular importance: the notion of the plane as a spatial field of forces in constant expansion, functioning simultaneously as immersive painting, volume, and architecture.

In 1958 Otero was awarded the National Prize for Painting in the Official Salon, and in 1959 he represented Venezuela in the

MoMA) in New York City.^[2]

In the 1960s he abandoned painting in order to work on a larger scale in his civic sculptures, such as Delta Solar. He also produced collages of objets trouvés, as in Page Picture No. 1.^[2]^[3] Towards the end of his life he carried out many monumental public art commissions in many American cities. In 2012 the exhibition Resonant Space: The Colorhythms of Alejandro Otero organized by the Instituto de Arte Contemporânea [pt] (IAC), was presented at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil.