JESÚS RAFAEL SOTO (Venezuela, 1923 - France, 2005).
Untitled, ca. 1992, from the Suite Olympic Centennial.
Silkscreen on Vélin d'Arches paper, copy 110/250.
Signed and dated in pencil in the lower right corner.
This work is part of the "Suite Olympic Centennial", complete edition 110/250, which will be auctioned on 27 September 2022, in 50 consecutive lots numbered 35245230 to 35245280.
Size: 63 x 90 cm.
A Venezuelan artist trained at the Escuela de Arte de Caracas, Jesús Soto was an outstanding representative of kinetic art, which he began and developed in the late 1950s. Between the seventies and the nineties, already fully established internationally, he held important exhibitions in places such as the MOMA and the Guggenheim in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, etc. He also took part in the Venice Biennale in 1966 and the São Paulo Biennale in 1996. Particularly famous for his penetrable sculptures, he also carried out projects such as the decoration of the main hall of the Teatro Teresa Carreño in Caracas. Soto was awarded the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas de Venezuela, and in 1973 the Venezuelan government inaugurated a museum in his honour in his native Ciudad Bolívar. He is currently represented in important collections such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
The Olympic Suite is composed of 50 lithographs and serigraphs chosen to represent various contemporary artistic trends. It was published to commemorate the first centenary of modern Olympism. The artists chosen are defined by diverse movements and pictorial trends, from the conceptualism and minimalism of "Ben" Vautier, the lyrical abstraction of Yasse Tabuchi, the painting of Oleg Tselkov which concentrates on the human figure, intensely expressive and treated with forceful forms and intense colours that seek to reflect the conflicts and violence of his time, and finally the work of André Arabis, clearly abstract and geometric.