The Concrete Invention: Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

The Fundación Cisneros/ Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros inaugurated on January 23 its first large exhibition in Europe at the MNCARS in Madrid. Entitled The Concrete Invention: Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, the exhibition will remain open until September 13, 2013.

Established during the decade of the 1970s by Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and Gustavo A. Cisneros, the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC) is one of the most important educational and cultural initiatives from the Fundación Cisneros. With headquarters in New York and Caracas, the CPPC aims to promote a better appreciation of the diversity and contributions offered by Latin American art, as well as fomenting excellence in artistic education and in the development of professionals in the field of Latin American art. These objectives are achieved through the conservation, study, presentation and promotion of the material Latin American Culture, from its ethnographic objects to contemporary art. The CPPC activities include exhibitions, publications, grants for research and artistic production, as well as the implementation of the educational platform Piensa en Arte/ Think Art.

The exhibition is part of the cooperation agreement signed in 2011 between the foundation and the MNCARS, with the objective of fomenting the promotion and awareness of Latin America's contribution to the history of modern and contemporary art, through the organization of a series of joint cultural projects.

One of the key moments in the art of the Twentieth Century is the modernity developed in Latin America between the decades of the 1930s and 1970s, as it took a different direction than that of the European and US modernists who dominated the visual arts scene of the time. Thus the importance of the collection, as it is one of the largest and most representative of the Latin American production, with key works from the aforementioned period.

The exhibition includes approximately 200 works in mediums as varied as painting, sculpture, installation, collage and graphic works. Many of these works had never before been exhibited to the Spanish public. Noteworthy is the curatorial approach based on an analysis of geometric abstraction and its multiple derivatives.

Included in the exhibition are about twenty or so master works donated to the MoMA in New York by Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, among these: Box Bolide by Helio Oiticica, Construcción en Blanco y Negro (Black and White Construction) by Joaquín Torres-García, and Fio, by Cildo Meireles. Some of the artists included in the exhibition are: Waltercio Caldas, Willys de Castro, Lygia Clark, Aluísio Carvao, Cruz-Díez, Milton Dacosta, Gego, Alfredo Hlito, Gyula Kosice, Judith Lauand, Jac Leirner, Tomás Maldonado, Cildo Meireles, Alejandro Otero, Lygia Pape, César Paternosto, Rhod Rothfuss, Mira Schendel, Jesús Soto, and Alfredo Volpi, among others.

The exhibition also offers a rich multimedia program that includes an interactive room inside the exhibition, a homepage, specific content for mobile phones and an iPad application.