The President of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Luis Alberto Moreno, met yesterday with Master Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez to discuss the artist’s works and to share ideas about the direction of creative industries throughout the Latin American and Caribbean region.
Cruz-Diez, considered a major figure in contemporary art and one of the founders of the Kinetic Art movement has lived and worked in Paris since 1960. His research and color experimentation brought about unconventional color structures in his paintings which the eye often perceives as motion.
While at the IDB, Cruz-Diez met with members of the IDB Cultural Center who provided a tour of the works in the IDB Art Collection. The Cultural Center is cooperating with the Cruz-Diez Foundation’s Catalog Raisonné project, which has begun a comprehensive investigation and documentation process in order to compile the artist’s body of work, authenticate it and retrace its history in the context of contemporary art.
Cruz-Diez is currently visiting Washington, DC, for the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum Panel Discussion, Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color and Space in conjunction with the exhibition by the same name. The panel discussion is scheduled for Thursday, February 23rd at 7:00 p.m. at the Hirshhorn Museum – Ring Auditorium (lower level). Suprasensorial artists Cruz-Diez and Julio LeParc will join exhibition curators Alma Ruiz and Valerie Fletcher to discuss the participatory and populist large-scale installations by LeParc, Cruz-Diez, Lucio Fontana, Jesús Rafael Soto and Hélio Oiticica. U.S. support for the panel discussion comes from the Latino Initiatives Pool, administered by the Smithsonian Latino Center with additional support from the IDB Cultural Center.
Iván Duque, Chief of the IDB Culture, Solidarity and Creative Affairs Division, emphasized the importance of the artist’s visit in celebrating the Cultural Center’s two decades of activities promoting the culture and creativity of the Latin American and Caribbean region. “The cultural treasures of Latin America and the Caribbean represent an inspiring tradition and are of tremendous importance to the world’s creative economies.”