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Lot Essay
With his innate feeling for design and invention, José Gurvich (Lithuania 1927 - New York 1974), used the most ordinary materials, magically transforming them with his unique vision. For Gurvich all media had great potential, he used a wide variety of found objects such as the wood frame loosely strung with wire that is the foundation of this 1962 Construcción en blanco y negro.
Gurvich laid down several coats of gesso, the weight of which "warped" the surface. Taking advantage of the "curved space," he compressed and expanded the painted wedge shapes in counter-point to the surface. The result is a precursor of "Op-art." Given his exuberant imagination, in this work he exercised great reticence as he discretely added a pair of legs here and a ladder there - important personal symbols of his iconography. Mari Carmen Ramírez, Curator of Latin American Art at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, observed that "Gurvich, more than any of the Taller Torres-García artists, was concerned with understanding the internal mechanisms of artistic creation and with regaining the spontaneous vision of the child as the basis of his art." This explains the playful spirit so evident in this delightful and distinctive work.
Gurvich laid down several coats of gesso, the weight of which "warped" the surface. Taking advantage of the "curved space," he compressed and expanded the painted wedge shapes in counter-point to the surface. The result is a precursor of "Op-art." Given his exuberant imagination, in this work he exercised great reticence as he discretely added a pair of legs here and a ladder there - important personal symbols of his iconography. Mari Carmen Ramírez, Curator of Latin American Art at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, observed that "Gurvich, more than any of the Taller Torres-García artists, was concerned with understanding the internal mechanisms of artistic creation and with regaining the spontaneous vision of the child as the basis of his art." This explains the playful spirit so evident in this delightful and distinctive work.