Alejandro OteroColoritmos

São Paulo's Instituto de Arte Contemporânea, in collaboration with the Nemirovsky Foundation and the Pinacoteca do Estado, presents Coloritmos, by Alejandro Otero. The show, curated by Rina Carvajal, will remain open to the public between September 3, 2012 and January 6, 2013.

This is the first international exhibition of Otero's coloritmos and the artist's first large-scale solo in Brazil. Alejandro Otero (Venezuela, 1921-1990) is a reference point in the history of abstract art. A painter and sculptor, his career evolved as a lucid and coherent visual investigation, gradually and exhaustively distilling artistic issues and taking them to their ultimate compositional consequences.

The coloritmos (75 in total) were developed between 1955 and 1960. This is one of the most relevant serialized works in the history of abstraction, and one of the artist's major conceptual contributions to the field of painting.

Otero defined his coloritmos as "elongated planks, traversed side to side by parallel white and dark bands whose interstices were furnished with shape in pure, bright colors. The purpose of the parallels is to ensure total dynamism, establishing a unidirectional rhythm that opens both to the sides and to the ends of the plank."