Carlos Cruz-Diez

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.

One of the finest exponents of Latin American Kinetic and Op art, the Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez (born in 1923) is a legend among contemporaries such as Jesus Soto and Alejandro Otero--and across Latin America and Europe--but has been woefully little exhibited in North America. Those who caught the groundbreaking 2007 traveling exhibition The Geometry of Hope will recall Cruz-Diez's standout contributions, which had viewers bumping into one another as they negotiated the color shifts and sensations of motion that his sculptural constructions induced. A pioneer in color theory and color perception, Cruz-Diez solicits physical participation in his audience. In late 2008, the Americas Society, known for its leading role in presenting innovative site installations by artists such as Gego, Lygia Pape and Pedro Reyes, orchestrated Cruz-Diez's first solo exhibition in the United States, for which Carlos Cruz Diez: InFormed by Color is the exhibition catalogue--the first comprehensive publication in English devoted to the artist.