ESTEBAN VICENTE Concrete Improvisations: Collages and Scupltures

Concrete Improvisations, a term Vicente employed to describe his collages, is the title of this exhibition that features both the artist’s collages and a selection of his small-scale sculptures.
Although Vicente began making collages in 1949 by employing left-over materials, he typically composed his works by tearing or cutting up hand-painted fine-art paper and arranging the pieces on paper or cardboard supports. The resulting combinations offer rich interplays of texture and color as the materials merge visually and, at times, become virtually indistinguishable from one another.

Not unsurprisingly, many of Vicente’s early collages convey the hallmarks of Abstract
Expressionist painting. The busy dispersal of lines and paper strips that make up numerous collages from the early 1950s, for example, recalls the spontaneously painted compositions of some of his contemporaries, such as Jackson Pollock and de Kooning. By this time Elaine de Kooning stated -“Vicente’s collages are uncharacteristically fluid and animated. Color and forms give a sense of continuous motion, sliding into one another, exchanging positions, continuing beyond”. Beginning in the mid-1950s, Vicente began to compose collages from flat, rectangular shapes that emphatically affirm the works’ two-dimensionality -an effect Greenberg praised as the crowning achievement of modernist collage and abstract painting. At the same time, Vicente’s blocks of color create an illusion of depth with lighter tones appearing to project and darker shades to recede.

Later collages of the 1960s feature brilliant colors and evocative shapes recalling the natural beauty of Vicente’s surroundings, -including his Long Island garden and Hawaii, where he spent a year.- In the 1970s structure and construction prevail, as well as rectangular colorful shapes, influenced by Mondrian, city architecture, and Minimalism. In the 1980s and beyond, Vicente’s freedom of execution culminates in ambivalent, geometric and organic shapes, vanishing forms floating in a luminous ambience.
Besides collages, the exhibition presents a selection of small-scale sculptures. Made between 1968 and the late 1990s, most of Vicente’s divertimientos or “toys”, -as he used to call them, are often no more than twelve inches tall, attesting to the artist’s ability to translate the formal achievements developed in his paintings and collages into three dimensions.
Vicente improvised these small sculptures by cobbling together left-over bits of wood and detritus scattered about his studio. Not intended for public display, these sculptures are the products of thoughtful, yet lighthearted, improvisations. They exude a sense of immediacy and whimsy. These recreational experiments and lyrical collages are paired for the first time in a museum exhibition.
As a whole, Vicente’s collages reveal interactions between the artistic innovations developing in contemporary New York’s vibrant art scene, as well as deep personal reflections on the nature of abstraction.
The exhibition is displayed in the Museum’s main galleries and is complemented with a video in which the artist explains his own creative process of collage making.

A selection of works from the Museum’s permanent collection is on view in the corridors