The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) is pleased to announce José Antonio Fernández-Muro: Geometry in Transfer, curated by Megan Kincaid. The second in a series on Latin American modernism at ISLAA, this exhibition is the first to comprehensively explore the Spanish Argentine artist’s luminous transfer paintings, which he developed in Buenos Aires in the 1950s and later elaborated on while living in New York City in the 1960s.
Círculo azul (1960), Oil on canvas
Rather than isolate what the artist termed his two “fundamental epochs” in Buenos Aires and New York, this exhibition emphasizes their critical continuities—visual, material, and ideological—to reveal Fernández-Muro’s displacement and transformation of Argentine abstraction. Presenting nine transfer paintings from ISLAA’s collection, it begins with three works produced during an understudied moment in Argentine modernism following the major breakthroughs, and unrealized utopian promises, of the artists associated with Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (AACI) and Grupo Madí. These early transfer paintings represent a reckoning with the limitations of concretism, integrating directions in abstraction from abroad and incorporating discoveries resulting from his participation in the collective Buen diseño para la industria in the mid-1950s. With dizzying optical effects and expressive surfaces, achieved by overlaying perforated metal grates and stencils onto complex, sweeping geometric assemblies, this transitional output pushed his painterly rhetoric beyond the constraints of hard-edged geometry, evoking associations with OpArt and lyrical abstraction alike.
Rojo (Leaden gate) (1964), Oil and mixed media on canvas
After relocating to Manhattan in the 1960s, Fernández-Muro returned to recognizable imagery, re-creating the visual imaginary of the urban landscape through impressions of sidewalks, sewer grates, and manhole covers. Celebrated and widely collected at the time, these frottage and embossed aluminum foil works evidence Fernández-Muro’s contact with the pervasive Pop art and assemblage sensibilities germinating in New York. With their insistent geometries, found in transfers of circular manhole covers or rectangular sewer grates, and their recourse to the grid, evident in rows of pennies or stamps, the paintings from his New York period further teased at the seams of rigid, non-representational abstraction.
The title of the exhibition, Geometry in Transfer, refers at once to Fernández-Muro’s expansion of geometric abstraction and his translation of Argentine modernist painting amid the visual preoccupations of the 1960s New York avant-garde. In the show’s concluding section, four small compositions that each focus on a single symbol or device are presented alongside never-before-displayed archival materials that clarify the artist’s rigorous multi-step process––affirming his unique contributions to mid-century painting.
José Antonio Fernández-Muro: Geometry in Transfer is accompanied by a publication including an essay by curator Megan Kincaid. Physical copies are available free of charge at ISLAA and for download online.
ISLAA is open from 2 to 5 PM on Tuesday and from 2 to 7 PM on Wednesday through Friday. Proof of vaccination is required in line with New York City regulations. Guests must wear masks and adhere to all COVID-19 guidelines while on-site. Although walk-ins are allowed, visitors are encouraged to book appointments in advance through ISLAA’s online scheduler. Please note that ISLAA will be closed from November 23 through November 26 and from December 24 through December 31 for the US holidays.
For press inquiries, please email Olivia Casa, ISLAA’s exhibition and curatorial manager, at olivia.casa@islaa.org.
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