Informed Informalism

Informed Informalism: Gramcko, Otero, Pardo, and Sanin opens on Saturday, September 13 in our upstairs project room.

Join us for a cocktail reception on Saturday, September 13, from 6 to 8 p.m.

OPENING RECEPTION AT SICARDI AYERS BACINO Saturday, September 13 from 6:00 to 8:00 pm.

EXHIBITION DATES  September 13 - November 22, 2025 

The exhibition Informed Informalism, features early works by Colombian artist Fanny Sanin, and by Venezuelan artists Elsa Gramcko, Mercedes Pardo and Alejandro Otero. In the voluminous book Twentieth Century Art of Latin America, Jacqueline Barnitz states, “Informalismo (informalism), as this type of abstraction was known in Latin America, took two main directions: one that depended on surface elaboration and texture, the other, on gestural brush strokes.” In the 1950s and 1960s many Latin American artists—at great political and professional peril—produced works that expanded the limits of abstract art, and recontextualized its focus on materiality, found objects and spontaneity.

Elsa Gramcko (1925-1994) was born in Venezuela. Of German descent, Gramcko was a largely self-taught artist, apart from a few free courses she enrolled in at the Facultad de Humanidades at the UCV in Caracas (1946) and her auditing of a class taught by Alejandro Otero at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Aplicadas (1955). Gramcko’s first works are marked by experimental tendencies and an interest in abstract art, which she later developed into geometric pieces. Throughout the artist’s lifetime, her work was exhibited within Latin America, as well as in the United States and Europe. Gramcko participated in the 1959 São Paulo Art Biennial. In 1960 she began to explore texture in her works as well as a darker palette, resulting in works that have been described as lunar landscapes. This interest was further developed using oxidized metals in works that are considered her first experiments with informalism. By 1964 she began to incorporate doors and pieces of wood into her work. That same year she represented Venezuela alongside Jesús Rafael Soto, Luisa Palacios, and others at the XXXII Venice Biennale.

Alejandro Otero (1921–1990) was a Venezuelan painter and sculptor who played a leading role in the history of modernist abstraction in his native land. He was awarded a scholarship to move to Paris and lived there between 1945 and 1952. It was in Paris that he began producing some of his most important bodies of work, including Las cafeteras (the coffeepots), painted between 1946 and 1948, a series that marked his transition from figuration to abstraction. The canvases of this series were exhibited at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas in 1949, an event that paved the way for the emergence of geometric abstraction in Venezuela. Upon his return to Paris in 1950, Otero founded the group Los Disidentes along with other young Venezuelan expatriate painters interested in abstraction. In 1955, Otero began to produce the Colorhythms, a series of modular paintings of Duco, an industrial lacquer, sprayed onto wood panels with white and dark parallel bands and vibrating forms of brilliant colors. Otero moved to Paris a second time in 1960 and lived there until 1964. His works underwent changes, and he experimented with collage, assemblage, and objets trouvés.