ONCEPTUALES

9.2.22–10.1.22
The Anderson
Virginia Commonwealth University
School of the Arts, Richmond, Virginia, US

For more than fifty years the grid has served Eugenio Espinoza (b.1950, Venezuela) as a constant site of invention, interrogation and insurgency. Tirelessly contesting its meaning and authority, Espinoza makes the grid, its legacies and logic, accountable to human experience, and a partner to our follies,vulnerabilities, joys and pains.

A student of Gego at the Instituto de Diseño Fundación Neumann-INCE in Caracas, Espinoza’s experiments with the grid began as a critical response to modernism and developed into a formal language of disruption.; Responding to the complicity of Concretismo and kinetic art with the oil-rich regimes of 1960s and ‘70s Venezuela, Espinoza sought and forged a formal language which could interrupt the easy alliance between art and the establishment.

Onceptuales maintains Eugenio’s long-standing formal interests while demonstrating how these continue to evolve. New materials such as packing foam and felt; procedural and structural developments, like the exposed loops and eyelets from which the works hang; and new material flourishes like the tatters and trizas of Onceptual #9 (2022) inflect and extend Espinoza’s established oeuvre. The exhibition includes new, cut-canvas, wall works from the ongoing Onceptuales series. Other works, like those from the Collaterales series, remix and recombine sculptural and pictorial strategies from across Espinoza’s diversified practice, hybridizing these with current developments. Large scale works such as Paso Doble (2022) and Exit (2007) continue Espinoza’s long standing interest in the artwork as site—a forum for social, architectural and phenomenological experience.

Born in 1950 in the highlands of Venezuela, Eugenio Espinoza studied art at the Instituto de Diseño Fundación Neumann-INCE in Caracas, Venezuela; at Pratt Institute, New York University; and the School of Visual Arts in New York City, New York.

Notable group and solo exhibitions include: Onceptuales, The Anderson, Richmond; Sur Moderno: Journeys of Abstraction, MoMA, New York (2019); Good, Blue Day, Piero Atchugarry Gallery, Miami (2019); Human Applause, Bortolami Gallery, New York (2018); Political Intent, Museum of Fine Arts Boston (2017); Raising the Curtain, Galería Moisés Pérez de Albéniz, Madrid, Spain (2017); Permission to be Global, Museum of Fine Arts Boston (2014).

Espinoza has been the subject of two retrospective exhibitions: Retro/Retrospective (2016-1972), Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Spain (2016), and Unruly Supports (1970 to 1980), Pérez Art Museum, Miami (2015).

In 2017 Espinoza was the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Fine Arts.

Espinoza’s works are included in the permanent collections of Tate Modern, London, U.K.; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Fundación Gego, Caracas; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Fine Arts Museum of Houston, Texas; the Blanton Museum, Austin, Texas; the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo in Sao Paulo; Museo de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro; the Cisneros-Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami; and many other prestigious private and public collections.

Eugenio Espinoza, Celia Silva, Sol Espinoza, Michael Panbehchi, Sarah Eckhardt, Madeline Ruffieux, Renn Trani, Bradley Sinanan, Cassie Knudsen and Aidan Quinlan.