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Lot Essay
“I begin to paint when a contact with the work has been established by an image formed in my mind,” Pacheco once reflected. “The total structure is many times an arbitrary world in which…decorative beauty does not exist…Space is the reality that has to be cut and filled with subjective and intimate expressions of myself” (in F. Angel, Tribute to María Luisa Pacheco of Bolivia, 1919-1982, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art of Latin America, Washington, D.C., 1986, p. 8). Born in La Paz, Pacheco studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in the late 1930s under the painters Cecilio Guzmán de Rojas and Jorge de la Reza and later worked as an illustrator and editor for the newspaper, La Razón (1948-50). In 1956, with encouragement from Armando Zegrí, director of the Galería Sudamericana, and José Gómez Sicre, who led the Visual Arts Section of the Pan American Union, she moved to New York, where she remained for the next twenty-six years. Celebrated for her lyrical and non-objective abstraction, Pacheco exhibited widely through the latter half of her career, with solo shows in Lima, Caracas, Bogotá, and elsewhere; she received the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1958, 1959, and 1960.
“The symbols, the colors and textures that [constitute] the language [of] my paintings are [but the reflection] of what Bolivia offers as an image, strong, different, and inescapably its own,” Pacheco observed in 1979. “I had absorbed subconsciously those influences. The great beauty of the objects created with a separation from natural forms centuries ago—the art of the pre-Columbian artist—[remained] fixed in my memory since my childhood. At the same time I felt the strong magnet of the landscape of the Andes. During my art studies and experiences throughout the years, I learned to create an emotional, semiabstract image of what I feel [confronted by] the gigantic landscape and the ancient art of Bolivia. I also learned simultaneously the [techniques] of good art, the professional approach to painting. With the combination of both, I can meet the sensitive eye of the spectator of art” (ibid., p. 8). Kinesis exemplifies the tactile materiality and monumentality characteristic of Pacheco’s late abstractions, its interpenetrating forms insinuating the slow accretion of time and space across the canvas. The push-and-pull of jagged, tectonic planes—some roughly textured and encrusted with sand and others heavily pigmented and nearly monochromatic—suggests immense kinetic and telluric energy that seems to expand and contract, inscribing both plastic and allusively Andean space.
In the early 1970s, “thanks to the intervention of Stanton Catlin, at that time the director of the art gallery of the Center for Inter-American Relations in New York, María Luisa Pacheco began to work exclusively for the Lee Ault and Company Gallery in New York,” recalls the artist and critic Félix Ángel. “Ault, a collector, had been president and editor of Art in America, a magazine which he had bought in 1957. He was convinced that the art being produced in Latin America was worthy of competing on the same level with art coming from other parts of the world. It was with an exhibit by María Luisa Pacheco that the Ault Gallery opened in May 1971, and it showed the artist at the height of her creative powers. Her association with the gallery not only established her firmly on the New York scene but also provided her with a springboard for the promotion of her reputation in Latin America. Through purchase or donation, works by her were incorporated into a number of significant public collections, among others those of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Mobil Corporation of New Jersey, the Archer Huntington Gallery of the University of Texas, and the National Museum of Fine Arts of Chile.” Kinesis was sourced from Ault and, like the monumental Catavi and intimate Valle (both 1974; Blanton Museum of Art), belongs to the ten-year “period of intense activity” at the end of Pacheco’s career that lasted until Ault’s retirement and the closure of his gallery (ibid., p. 20).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
“The symbols, the colors and textures that [constitute] the language [of] my paintings are [but the reflection] of what Bolivia offers as an image, strong, different, and inescapably its own,” Pacheco observed in 1979. “I had absorbed subconsciously those influences. The great beauty of the objects created with a separation from natural forms centuries ago—the art of the pre-Columbian artist—[remained] fixed in my memory since my childhood. At the same time I felt the strong magnet of the landscape of the Andes. During my art studies and experiences throughout the years, I learned to create an emotional, semiabstract image of what I feel [confronted by] the gigantic landscape and the ancient art of Bolivia. I also learned simultaneously the [techniques] of good art, the professional approach to painting. With the combination of both, I can meet the sensitive eye of the spectator of art” (ibid., p. 8). Kinesis exemplifies the tactile materiality and monumentality characteristic of Pacheco’s late abstractions, its interpenetrating forms insinuating the slow accretion of time and space across the canvas. The push-and-pull of jagged, tectonic planes—some roughly textured and encrusted with sand and others heavily pigmented and nearly monochromatic—suggests immense kinetic and telluric energy that seems to expand and contract, inscribing both plastic and allusively Andean space.
In the early 1970s, “thanks to the intervention of Stanton Catlin, at that time the director of the art gallery of the Center for Inter-American Relations in New York, María Luisa Pacheco began to work exclusively for the Lee Ault and Company Gallery in New York,” recalls the artist and critic Félix Ángel. “Ault, a collector, had been president and editor of Art in America, a magazine which he had bought in 1957. He was convinced that the art being produced in Latin America was worthy of competing on the same level with art coming from other parts of the world. It was with an exhibit by María Luisa Pacheco that the Ault Gallery opened in May 1971, and it showed the artist at the height of her creative powers. Her association with the gallery not only established her firmly on the New York scene but also provided her with a springboard for the promotion of her reputation in Latin America. Through purchase or donation, works by her were incorporated into a number of significant public collections, among others those of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Mobil Corporation of New Jersey, the Archer Huntington Gallery of the University of Texas, and the National Museum of Fine Arts of Chile.” Kinesis was sourced from Ault and, like the monumental Catavi and intimate Valle (both 1974; Blanton Museum of Art), belongs to the ten-year “period of intense activity” at the end of Pacheco’s career that lasted until Ault’s retirement and the closure of his gallery (ibid., p. 20).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park