Mercedes Azpilicueta (La Plata, Argentina, 1981) is an artist who calls herself a dishonest researcher. She is best known for her language-based works and her explorations of overlooked female figures of history.

Through extensive archival work, from art history to popular music, from literature to street culture, her work brings together diverse figures from the past and present, and reflects on their dissident trajectories including their voices, forms, texts, traces, and memories in a multi-layered work. Far from falling into cold reverence or archival fascination, her work successfully addresses the body with all its defects and potential embracing its fragility, as well as its capacity for resistance and care.

Azpilicueta’s practice has recently evolved towards exploring the theatrical possibilities of three dimensional work and installation. Disguised as sculptures, her woven pieces should not be taken for granted, as they have the potential to be activated in various ways such as scores, sets, props, mnemonic devices, or records.

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Carlos Cruz-Diez (Caracas, Venezuela, 1923 - Paris, France, 2019) was one of the most prominent figures of Kinetic art whose work has been based upon the revaluation of color as an experience in itself, as a phenomenon of light in which interpretation or cultural background is no longer relevant. His artistic practice invites viewers to become conscious of how perceptual relationships constitute the aesthetic, and how every context implies a different approach and construction of the same artwork.

His research has positioned him as one of the key thinkers of the 20th century when it comes to color. He has contributed majorly to the possibility of rethinking the relations between artist, spectator, and art, framing them within a participative process rooted exclusively in the use of color. In 1959 Cruz-Diez began his series Physichromie, through which he realized the idea of chromatic autonomy and its impact upon the viewer’s environment; one of the results was an important body of work that in later decades surpassed the limits of painting and explored the transformation of diverse spaces through the manipulation of color.

His work emphasizes participation and interaction, spatial perception, and movement as the key elements of the artistic experience.

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Gego (Hamburg, Germany, 1912 - Caracas, Venezuela, 1994) studied architecture and engineering at the Stuttgart Technical School, Germany, where she was tutored by architect Paul Bonatz, following the models proposed by the Bauhaus and Russian Constructivism. In 1939, due to persecution from the Nazi regime, the artist migrated to Venezuela, settling in Caracas.

In her new country of residence, Gego dedicated to design, furniture making, and the development of architectural projects. Additionally, she began a long teaching career that would lead her to be one of the founders and subsequent professors of the Institute of Design from the Neumann Foundation (Caracas) in 1964. It was during the 1950s that she deepened her artistic practice, which was at first of a figurative, expressionist type, and then —already in dialogue with kinetic artists like Alejandro Otero and Jesús Rafael Soto— of a sculptural type, grounded upon spectator participation, action, and movement as key principles of production.

Her work is characterized by the experimentation with lines upon space, conceived as the most elemental unit of drawing, as well as for the innovative use of the grid, a form intimately related to abstraction in modern art. In 1969, Gego exhibited Reticulárea at the Caracas Museum of Fine Arts, an installation whose importance in the history of art cannot be understated. It is an assembly of modular pieces made of steel and aluminum, which constitute an apparently organic vast structure, which experience is marked by the rupture of the spaces that hold them in place.

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Magali Lara (Mexico City, Mexico, 1956) is considered a central figure of feminist postmodern art in Mexico. She has a degree in Visual Arts for Plastic Expression from the University of Guadalajara and a Master of Arts from the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos. With more than 40 years of artistic practice based on collaborations with poets and performers, Lara has developed a multidisciplinary practice that explores issues related to the unconscious, everyday life, emotions, the body, the feminine, and the “otherness”.

Influenced by women painters of the Mexican school such as Maria Izquierdo, Olga Costa, and Frida Kahlo, Lara takes up an interest in still life, objects, and dreamlike atmospheres. These elements are used to compose a unique symbolic language that she has brought to the fields of animation, drawing, writing, ceramics, the artist’s book, painting, and textiles. Mainly associated with Conceptual art, Magali Lara has been constantly working on a “poetics” that delves into the body, intimacy, desire, motherhood, childhood, sexuality, and everyday life; all this from a perspective of subjectivity. Starting from the ordinary and the visceral of the human body allows her to make a philosophical review of the human condition, something that the artist considers essential in the social function of art.

Since the nineties, she has worked at the Facultad de Artes de la Universidad Autónoma de Morelos. She is currently part of the Academic Body of the Master’s Degree in art production and participates as a jury in several biennials and artistic production, and as a study plan advisor in various arts education institutions. She is a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores FONCA, which she accessed for the seventh time in the 2020-2023 period. In 2019 she received the Medal of Merit in Arts from Mexico City’s Congress.

She currently lives and works in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Her work is represented in collections in the United States, Mexico and Argentina.

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Felipe Pantone (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1986) began his practice as a teenager, making graffiti in Torrevieja, in the south of Spain. Calligraphy and typography, the fundamental focus of graffiti, were the platform from which the artist undertook the development of an abstract or geometric visual language that aims to be both accessible and democratic, parallel to current technological speech. Pantone's work maintains a historical connection with current production methods and with the visual references of the hyper-connected and digitized society. His work is a meditation on the ways in which we consume visual information in current times.

Abstraction is first used as stylistic branding and then poured towards the references of the present time full of infographics, statistics, and visual representations of data that synthesize realities into quickly understandable formats. With this, Pantone reflects on the impact of the digital revolution and global communication on the constitution of the contemporary subject. In today’s accelerated world of industrial production with light, color or previously impossible visual experiences, Pantone recognizes chromatic combinations —such as the glitch or technological failure— as visual experiences linked to contemporary culture. The result is a language that moves between technology and the fine arts, taken to several applications.

Among his most outstanding public installations are the murals commissioned by the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, France; the mosaic at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain; the murals in two buildings of the Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico; the mural Optichromie at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, USA and the mural 300,000 Km/s on Faria Lima Avenue in São Paulo, Brazil.

He currently lives and works in Valencia, Spain.

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Jesús Rafael Soto (Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela, 1923 - Paris, France, 2005) was an influential and central figure of post-war global modernism. He participated in the group exhibition Le mouvement (1955), at the Denise René Gallery in Paris, one of the foundational moments of the style. Throughout his career, he was prominent for the redefinition of the social role of art, rooted in wide research about the spatial-temporal quality of the artistic object.

Soto studied Fine Arts in Caracas, then he moved to Paris in 1950, where he became a part of the international group of artists that sought to renew the experimental art scene. Even though he has been commonly associated with Op Art, Soto’s work is rather characterized by the continuous study of movement and the dematerialization of the form, producing kinetic constructions where the active participation of the spectator is fundamental.

In 1958 he began Vibraciones, a series consisting of the overlap, in various levels, of grids and mobile objects that create infinite possibilities of vibrations and variations. Soto managed to create works accessible to all people, without marking the differences of age or cultural capital of the public, appealing to the very experience of the viewer in relation to the artistic object.

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Ding Yi’s (Shanghai, China, 1962) career includes studies in decorative arts at the Shanghai School of Arts & Crafts, a position as a designer in a toy factory, and studies in traditional Chinese painting at Shanghai University. The diversity of this background has been reflected, in his work, in the simultaneous coexistence of a high degree of apparent mechanization, repetition and precision, along with a creative impulse towards novelty and formal experimentation.

Though as a student he already favored abstraction, it was in 1988, when he began the infinite series called Appearance of Crosses, in which he started to develop a unique visual language that contradicted the typical formats of Chinese painting of that time. Using the cross as a formal referent, sometimes emptied from meaning, and sometimes associated with negation, Ding Yi established a distance from expression and the sentiment that predominated in his artistic environment. The idea of combining the principles of design with those of painting resulted, then, in an approach that he has called “the rational abstract”, in which the rigor of the lattice coincides with the dynamism of stroke and color.

His artistic practice includes painting, sculpture and installation, and is circumscribed by the idea of promoting the autonomy of the artistic field beyond politics and history. As he has stated: “abstract art can represent the spirit”.

He currently lives and works in Shanghai, China.

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