Cecilia de Torres, Ltd.
The Armory Show 2017

"Significant Others" features works by three Latin American artist couples that highlight the complexity and diversity of creative exchange between partners. The selection of aesthetic dialogues range from the uniquely symbiotic, to the subtly imperceptive, to direct interactive collaborations.

Fellow Venezuelan émigrés, Gego (1912-1994) and Gerd Leufert (1914-1998), informed each other’s practice significantly through their life-long commitment to exploring the line and abstraction. Gerd Leufert’s "Serie Ganchos" drawings from the 1980s incorporate direct imprints of the wire elements from Gego’s sculptural series, "Dibujos sin papel," from the same decade. These works reflect the unique symbiotic relationship between the couple’s oeuvre.

The partnership of Sarah Grilo (1919-2007) and José Antonio Fernández-Muro (1920-2014) was significantly different. Having received the same foundational training in Concrete Art, the couple’s artistic trajectories deviated from each other’s after moving to New York in 1962. Fernández-Muro continued to produce hyper-chromatic geometric structures inspired by Pop Art. Grilo, on the other hand, moved towards a more lyrical abstraction of monochromatic palettes and graffiti-like scriptures.

Marta Chilindron (b. 1951) and Eduardo Costa’s (b. 1940) direct collaboration in the early 1990s produced a wide range of conceptual and concrete work. Our selection from their interactive "Talking Paintings" series are shown in the United States for the first time. The series is compromised of works created out of pages from art and fashion magazines that are reworked and repositioned to evoke alternative readings from their original intent. Upon the viewer’s interruption of the works’ physical space, a hypnotic voice intoning a narcissistic monologue is triggered.