One of the world's foremost collections of Latin American abstract art, the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros features works from Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay by Joaquin Torres-Garcia, Hélio Oiticica and Jesús Soto, among many others.

A Constructive Vision: Latin American Abstract Art from the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Fundación Cisneros/Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

In the 19th century, European and North American travelers illustrated narratives of their explorations in the New World that were published in Europe. Europeans imagined the tropics as a site for cultural imperialism and fantasies of self-realization. Traveler artists often authenticated this perception by presenting the landscape as an enchanted land. Later in the century, native artists began to pick up the European landscape tradition and reflect on their own culture through a different lens. Traveler Artists contributes new scholarship to this burgeoning field and offers original research on 52 artworks by such key figures as Frans Post, Frederick Edwin Church, José María Velasco and Auguste Morisot, many of which are reproduced here for the first time.

Traveler Artists: Landscapes of Latin America from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection

A leading practitioner of Kinetic and Op art, and one of Latin America's foremost artists, the Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez (born 1923) traveled in western Europe throughout the 1950s, absorbing Bauhaus color theory and trends in geometric abstraction, and returned to Venezuela in 1957 to help initiate the massive wave of experiment in abstract, Concrete, Op and Kinetic art that art history outside of Latin America is only just beginning to catch up with. Jesus Soto and Alejandro Otero were among Cruz-Diez's immediate contemporaries, and all three shared a concern with interplays between color and perception, which Cruz-Diez has continued to pursue in installations, environments and public sculptures. For this latest volume in the Fundación Cisneros' Conversations/Conversaciones series, Ariel Jiménez interviews Cruz-Diez about his art and career, which spans some of the most exciting transformations in the history of Latin American art.

Carlos Cruz-Diez in conversation with Ariel Jimenez / Carlos Cruz-Diez en conversación con Ariel Jimenez (English and Spanish Edition)

Carlos Cruz-Diez

Ariel Jiménez

Individual Artists

The Fundación Cisneros’ new Conversaciones series is dedicated to the exchange of ideas between artists and authors. This second publication in the series contains a collection of interviews between the Argentine-born artist, industrial designer and theorist Tomás Maldonado and writer María Amalia García. Maldonado established his reputation while a professor at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, Germany. Under his leadership, the school functioned as an extraordinary laboratory of design and a center of talent until 1968. More than 20 years after its closing, Ulm is still considered one of the most important European schools of design since the Bauhaus. María Amalia García is an accomplished art historian, who has written extensively on abstract art in Argentina and Brazil.

Tomás Maldonado in conversation with/en conversación con María Amalia García (English and Spanish Edition)

María García

Tomás Maldonado

This third publication in the Fundación Cisneros' Conversaciones/Conversations series puts Brazilian conceptual artist Jac Leirner in dialogue with art historian Adele Nelson. Leirner (born 1961) emerged in the early 1990s at the forefront of a new, transnational generation of artists looking to the art of the 1960s and 1970s as a point of departure. Leirner's meticulously constructed works carve out a place for commonplace objects, from cigarette packs and plastic shopping bags to cutlery and currency. In this, the first in-depth study of Leirner's creative process, Nelson interviews the artist about more than two decades of production.

Jac Leirner in conversation with Adele Nelson / Jac Leirner en conversación con Adele Nelson (English and Spanish Edition)

Adele Nelson

Jac Leirner

As an art critic, political essayist, playwright and poet, Ferreira Gullar (born 1930) has been a key figure in the Brazilian cultural scene of the last 60 years. His extensive poetic output has been closely intertwined with his work as an art critic, from his first major collection of poems in 1954, through his Concrete and Neoconcrete poems from 1957 to 1959 and the “Neoconcrete Manifesto” and the “Theory of the Non-Object” of 1959. All are now essential reference texts in Brazilian and Latin American literature, deeply influencing generations of artists. This publication presents conversations conducted over the past two years between Gullar and art historian Ariel Jiménez. Gullar discusses everything from his childhood and early education in San Luis to his current writing, providing a full picture of this influential Brazilian poet and intellectual.

Ferreira Gullar in Conversation with Ariel Jiménez (FUNDACION CISNE)

Jiménez, Ariel

Gullar, Ferreira

Humor & Entertainment

Venezuela’s primary exponent of Kinetic and Op art, Jesús Soto (1923–2005) is one of the most important Latin American artists of the twentieth century. Here, in conversations with Ariel Jiménez, Soto recounts his childhood in Ciudad Bolivar, Venezuela; his first encounters with painting; his unending search for “thinking” time and space as dimensions beyond pictorial representation; and the development of his ideas that finally lead him to the creation of his famous Penetrables, large kinetic sculptures through which the viewer walks. This volume is a revised and expanded edition of Conversaciones con Jesús Soto (2001), which served as the inspiration for the Fundación Cisneros’ Conversaciones/ Conversations series.

Jesús Soto in Conversation with Ariel Jiménez

The Fundación Cisneros’ Conversaciones/Conversations series is dedicated to preserving firsthand testimonies of leading artists and intellectuals from Latin America. Argentinian artist Liliana Porter has lived and worked in New York since 1964; her work has been exhibited internationally and is represented in many public and private collections. Using a wide range of media--including sculpture, printmaking, works on canvas, photography, video and installation--Porter playfully mixes the absurd with the philosophical to create extraordinary portrayals of everyday scenes and plights. In this, the seventh volume of the Conversaciones series, Porter is in dialogue with art historian and critic Inés Katzenstein. She describes with simplicity and humor the ways in which her work blends the real with the representational, often in hypothetical yet convincing mini-dramas using mass-produced, kitsch objects that elicit both our compassion and laughter.

Liliana Porter in Conversation with Inés Katzenstein

Gyula Kosice (born 1924) is an innovative Argentine artist and poet. His constructions and sculptures were inspired as much by local discussions and disputes in the cafés of 1940s Buenos Aires as by the international avant-garde. In dialogue with Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro in this latest volume from the Fundación Cisneros’ Conversaciones/Conversations series, Kosice recalls his contributions to an era of hotly debated movements and manifestos; the magazine Arturo; the formation of Arte Madí; his interactive mobiles; and his groundbreaking use of materials like neon and water to articulate a futuristic vision that includes Hydrospatial City, a community suspended in space.

Gyula Kosice in Conversation with Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro

The Fundación Cisneros’ Conversaciones/Conversations series publishes firsthand testimonies of leading artists and intellectuals from Latin America. German-born Uruguayan Luis Camnitzer (born 1937) has been an influential artist, theorist, teacher and curator for nearly five decades. He was at the vanguard of 1960s Conceptualism, working in printmaking, sculpture installation and other media. Camnitzer’s work challenges our perception of reality and the status quo and is often characterized by its humorous, often politically charged use of language to underscore issues of power and commodification. In this eighth volume from the Conversaciones series, Camnitzer continues to explore his unique approach to Conceptualism and art as pedagogy with Latin American art scholar Alexander Alberro.

Luis Camnitzer in Conversation with Alexander Alberro (Conversations / Conversacions)

Camnitzer, Luis

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Books by Fundación Cisneros/Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros