Joaquin Torres-Garcia: Constructing Abstraction with Wood

Joaquín Torres-García (1874–1949) is one of the most influential artists to have emerged from Latin America in the early 20th century. His unique innovations in the medium of wood—constructed three-dimensional grids and planes known as maderas—foreshadow later artistic developments in Europe and the Americas (such as the work of Louise Nevelson). Torres-García was also much celebrated for his work as a modernist painter, teacher, and author. This handsome catalogue focuses on Torres-García’s wood constructions and accompanies the first exhibition held in North America of these works and the first solo exhibition of the artist in the United States in over forty years. It includes essays by prominent scholars that discuss the creation of the maderas and their place in the debates surrounding abstract art in Paris in the late 1920s and early 1930s and in Montevideo, his hometown in Uruguay, in the late 1930s and 40s. It also includes newly translated writings by the artist.