The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) is pleased to present a selection of works by Alejandro Otero at ISLAA, as part of the Spotlight series.
ISLAA Spotlights is a series of focused presentations that highlight works by individual artists across our programmatic spaces. On view during select hours and by appointment, these displays create opportunities for close engagement with artists and ideas that remain underrepresented in dominant art historical narratives, offering a platform to explore their practices in greater depth.
This Spotlight presentation is organized by Micaela Vindman.
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Alejandro Otero (El Manteco, Venezuela, 1921–1990) was a leading figure of Venezuelan and Latin American modern art. His work played a decisive role in the development of abstraction in the region. Otero spent his childhood in Upata and Ciudad Bolívar. In 1939, at age eighteen, he moved to Caracas, where he studied at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Aplicadas under artist Antonio Edmundo Monsanto. His early work focused on figurative subjects, including people, flowers, and landscapes.
In 1945, Otero traveled to Paris, where he established a studio and became actively involved in the artistic debates of the postwar period. While in France, Otero cofounded Los Disidentes, a group formed by Venezuelan artists and writers living in Paris in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Its members included Jesús Rafael Soto, Mateo Manaure, and Pascual Navarro. Through their work and an eponymous journal, the group critiqued academicism and advocated for abstraction as a contemporary cultural position.
During these years, his work shifted away from figuration through a series of still-lifes centered on domestic objects—such as coffee pots, utensils, and lamps—that increasingly dissolve into structured, rhythmic compositions of line, form, and surface. These works, later grouped within the Cafeteras (Coffee Makers) series, marked his first sustained engagement with abstraction. They were exhibited in Caracas in the late 1940s, provoking debate and signaling a turning point in Venezuelan modern art.
Between 1952 and 1960, Otero returned to Caracas and played a central role in the movement to integrate the visual arts with architecture at the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas, designed by architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva. The project brought together leading Venezuelan and international artists, including Jesús Rafael Soto, Carlos Cruz-Diez, and Alexander Calder, among others. Within this context, Otero produced monumental works that positioned abstraction as a civic language, embedded in everyday life and inseparable from the spatial and social rhythms of the city.
In parallel, Otero embarked on an intense period of work on what would become one of the most significant series of his career, the Coloritmos (Colorhythms). In the words of curator Luis Pérez-Oramas, “Coloritmos … are vertical or horizontal rectangular paintings that unfold in countless serial compositional variations. Otero strove for rhythmic-chromatic resonances in these radical works.” They are considered one of the most influential series in Latin American geometric abstraction and among the earliest typologies in the movement.
In 1951, Otero married the Venezuelan painter Mercedes Pardo, with whom he shared an enduring artistic dialogue. By the early 1960s, he returned to Paris, where his work shifted toward a more intimate and quiet register. During this period, he began exploring assemblage and collage, incorporating found objects such as saws, keys, locks, wires, tin cans, wood fragments, doors, and windows. Otero continued to reorient his work, incorporating personal items such as letters, envelopes and stamps. These works marked a departure from the chromatic systems of the Coloritmos series, while maintaining his commitment to structure and material investigation.
When Otero returned to Venezuela in the mid-1960s, his work shifted again, incorporating newspapers into his pieces. Painted over but often deliberately left partially legible, these elements introduced fragments of everyday communication and public information into the work, creating a tension between abstraction and reference. This led to the development of Papeles coloreados (Colored Papers), the main series featured in this Spotlight presentation. Choosing the daily press as a raw material allowed him to situate himself in a specific place and moment. Having just returned after living outside Venezuela for four years, it was a way of reconnecting with the reality of his country. Working on paper, Otero explored color as a layered, responsive surface that allowed text, images, and chromatic fields to coexist. These works reveal a quieter, more reflective dimension of his practice, while also registering the social and political atmosphere of their time.
Alongside these works, this presentation includes a selection of small-scale engravings in which Otero turned to the close study of nature, working in markedly reduced formats and across different media. These works underscore the continuity that runs throughout his career, revealing an ongoing commitment to development rather than rupture. Produced in the late 1960s—a moment when Otero was simultaneously engaged in the realization of large-scale public sculptures—these engravings suggest a return to the point of departure of his practice: renewed attention to observation and to the figurative impulse, now shaped by decades of abstraction. Considered together, these works point to a practice in which earlier concerns return over time, reshaped by new materials, scales, and conditions.
Otero’s ability to move between the intimate and the monumental—between paintings, works on paper, engravings, assemblages, and large-scale public sculptures—underscores his understanding of abstraction as a living language, shaped by observation, material engagement, and historical circumstance. This expanded conception of abstraction was recognized internationally, notably in his participation in Signals Gallery in London, where his work was positioned within a transnational network of artists rethinking abstraction beyond European and American paradigms. Alejandro Otero’s practice is best understood not as a linear progression but as a sustained inquiry, in which earlier concerns resurface over time, shaped by changing conditions and contexts.
—Micaela Vindman