Nara Roesler Gallery has conceived for the forthcoming edition of Tefaf New York 2024 a show including a selection of works by masters of Modern abstraction from Europe and the Americas. With a special weight given to the presence of a group of outstanding women artists active in both continents during the second half of the XXth Century, such as Gego, Amelia Toledo, Mira Schendel, Sheila Hicks, the show will also include works by Norberto Nicola, Abraham Palatnik, Tomie Ohtake and Heinz Mack.
Since antiquity the idea of marks and the function of words have been reported to the primitive concept of link: legein, which means to knot, to gather, to pick and by extension, upon its power for linking the diverse, building the metaphor or dressing the metonymy, legein ended up also meaning to speak, to say (logos). It is not a minor philological fact that the very notion of logos (thinking) finds its root in the Greek archaic legein.
All legein translates visually or conceptually as a lattice, and all the works in this selection respond to, or resonate with the idea of lattice. All are made of latticework, all translate as meshes, webs, interlacing and nettings. Lattice can be said at the origin of graphic forms, including words as human manual gestures.
The show will be structured by transformational series and resonances: Gego's superb masterwork -the Reticularea Column from 1969- as well as her masterly schematic and sober Drawing without Paper #11 from 1976 will be shown vis-à-vis Mira Schendel's unique and never exhibited series of gestural monotypes (ca. 1964) devoted to her intellectual friendship with Amelia Toledo, featuring a gestural ritornello with the name of Amelia depicted as a graphic interlacing, therefore summarizing both abstraction and writing. Amelia Toledo's paintings featuring a sort of lattice-like brushstrokes and her sublime 1960's collages -featuring a subtle density of papers resembling colored shadows- while echoing Gego's skiagraphy effect-the writing of shadows cast by her sculptures- will resonate vis-à-vis the presence of an equally unique and foundational lithographic book devoted by Gego to the very formal genesis of lines (Lineas, 1966), arguably a seminal work in Gego's career as stated in the recent Guggenheim's retrospective. Lines, streams of color and shadows are basic elements of lattice, and potential schemes for tectonic and optical compositions, as shown in Heinz Mack, Abraham Palatnik and Tomie Ohtake works, also from the 1960's-70's. Finally echoing both Gego's structural subtleness and Amelia Toledo's deep sense of color, the literal lattices by Sheila Hicks -her impressive ensemble titled Talking sticks (2024), as to refer to the logos as word and to the knot as language- will be juxtaposed with the yet to be internationally discovered work of Brazilian textile master Norberto Nicola.