Art for Sale from the World's Best Artists - Artspace

Phaidon's Latin American Artists: From 1785 to Now showcases more than 300 modern and contemporary artists born or based in Latin America, as chosen by an expert panel of 68 advisors and writers. Artspace showcases a thoughtful collection that highlights exclusive works from artists featured in the survey, including Felix Gonzalez Torres, Carmen Herrera, Liliana Porter, Jorge Pardo, and Carlos Cruz Diez. Explore the Latin American artists, celebrated internationally and names less-known outside their native countries, who together demonstrate the variety and vitality of artwork being made in and outside of Latin America. 

“Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who lived for years with HIV and died of AIDS-related causes, made art that has often been interpreted as representing embodiment, loss, and mortality.  He frequently amassed commonplace objects—stacks of paper or piles of candy—allowing viewers the choice about whether to take one (and likewise the exhibitor had freedom to choose when, how, and to what extent to replenish the pile). Through his malleable and collaborative approach, Gonzalez-Torres radically reoriented the relationships between artist, artwork, and audience.”

“Carmen Herrera was a Cuban American artist who developed an innovative body of work in an abstract language that prefigured Op art and Minimalism yet only gained widespread international recognition in her late eighties. Herrera conceptualized her paintings as objects, using the physical structure of the canvas as a compositional tool and integrating the surrounding environment. Her approach to painting and sculpture questioned the concepts of balance and asymmetry, provoking disorienting illusions of depth in which bright colors or black and white shapes create sensory experiences.”

“The work of Liliana Porter explores the limits between representation, fiction, and reality through diverse media including printmaking, photography, painting, drawing, assemblage, video, installation, and theater pieces. She began incorporating toys and miniature sculptures in her work from the 1970s onward—a natural continuation of her investigations into dislocation, continuity, memory, and nostalgia. Throughout her practice, Porter uncovers the dramatic potential of subtle actions, proposing dialogical and theatrical situations that use absurdity, ideology, and humor to create conceptual paradoxes.”

“Over several decades Jorge Pardo’s interdisciplinary practice has advanced the contemporary art field toward design and architecture. Taking as a starting point the industrial post-mid-century landscape of interior decoration, Pardo’s multimedia installations propose a new way to understand the social and historical meaning of spaces through a distinctive mix of painting, sculpture, applied arts, design, and domestic objects, where pop culture and high art meet together in everyday life. The artist has explored decoration as a cultural text, revisiting the modernist ideal of the total space both on a small and a monumental scale.”

“Color was both the material and the subject of a vast, thorough artistic and theoretical investigation to which Carlos Cruz-Diez devoted his long life. His work addressed color as an autonomous, permanently changing reality to be experienced without support, form, or reference to the outside world. His work exemplifies the artist’s efforts to give full autonomy to color and to use it as a way to change the experience of a space.”