Oswaldo Vigas: Return, Always Return

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Kwai Fung Hin is pleased to present Oswaldo Vigas: Return, Always Return, the first solo exhibition of the Venezuelan artist in Asia and also his first exhibition with Kwai Fung Hin supported by Oswaldo Vigas Foundation. This year marks the 100th birth anniversary of the artist. The exhibition celebrates Oswaldo Vigas’s (1923 – 2014) artistic achievements and offers an overview of his cross-cultural practice that helps define Latin American modernism in its own terms. With significant attention turning to Latin American modernism in recent years, Kwai Fung Hin is initiating the dialogue in Asia to broaden the global discourse of modern art.

As one of the most influential Latin American artists in the post-war period, Vigas played a pivotal role in the avant-garde art scenes in both Venezuela and Paris where he lived from 1952 to 1964. He was associated with many Latin American and European modern artists, such as Picasso, Wifredo Lam, Fernand Léger, Max Ernst, and Roberto Matta, among others, fostering cultural exchange across continents. As the first Venezuelan artist to draw on ancient iconographies from pre-Columbian and ancient African culture to articulate the unprecedented changes of the modern time, Vigas is celebrated as a forerunner not only in his country but also Europe, South and North America.

Taking a verse from the artist’s poem “Return from the Night” as its title, Return, Always Return sheds light on Vigas’s important periods of artistic development, from his discovery of the mythological universe in ancient cultures, to the twelve years of transformative period in Paris, to his return to Venezuela with a full control of his own language, moving freely between figuration and abstraction but always rooted in Latin American heritage. Arranged roughly chronologically across two gallery spaces, the works together with a collection of important archival materials illustrate his quest to return to the origin amid the rapid modernization of Venezuela and the rest of the world. It highlights his diverse styles that reflect his unwavering belief in the power of art to renew humanity at its origin.