Oswaldo Vigas

"Oswaldo Vigas 1943-2013," a three-year, traveling exhibition of seventy paintings and five sculptures by the late Venezuelan artist will be on view at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá (www.mambogota.com) July 16-August 23, 2015. Curated by Bélgica Rodríguez and organized by the Oswaldo Vigas Foundation, the work in the exhibition spans seven decades of the artist's life. "Oswaldo Vigas 1943-2013" launched at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Lima (MAC Lima). The exhibition then went to the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Chile (MNBA) in Santiago. Following Bogotá, the exhibition will travel to São Paulo and Mexico City. Born in Valencia, Venezuela in 1923, Oswaldo Vigas died in Caracas on April 22, 2014 at the age of 90. Vigas is hailed as a pioneer of Latin American art. He synthesized his Latin American roots with the most advanced pictorial currents of modernity. Vigas experimented with both figurative and abstract painting in his quest to find his own voice. There have been over 100 solo exhibitions of Vigas's paintings, sculpture, engravings, tapestries and ceramics. His work is included in the collections of many international public and private institutions. "Oswaldo Vigas is one of the true inventors of Latin American art," said poet and art critic Jean Clarence Lambert. "He contributed to keeping alive the natural cultural trends of South America, which are, as Vigas himself described, prelogical, magical, mythological and anti-rationalist." At the end of his life, Vigas was overcome with an insatiable need to draw and to write poetry, an early passion. In his later years, he began a series of Crucifixion paintings inspired by drawings that he had done on newspapers and on concert programs.