NYAB Event - Jesús Rafael Soto “SOTO UNEARTHED: A 1968 Film and Selected Early Works”

Jesús Rafael Soto “SOTO UNEARTHED: A 1968 Film and Selected Early Works”

BOSI Contemporary

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BOSI Contemporary announces “SOTO UNEARTHED: A 1968 Film and Selected Early Works”, an exhibition by Venezuelan kinetic artist, Jesús Rafael Soto. In 2009, BOSI Contemporary owner, Sandro Bosi, was in Europe conducting extensive research on the provenance of a Soto piece. In that process, he happened upon an extremely rare film of the artist in the Italian film archive, Cineteca Nazionale. It turned out that the film, entitled "Soto”, was produced in 1968 as a promotional piece highlighting the work for Jesus Rafael Soto's concurrent exhibition at the former Marlborough Gallery, Italy. On October 19, 2012 from 6 to 9PM, BOSI Contemporary will present this extremely rare film as part of "SOTO UNEARTHED: A 1968 Film and Selected Early Works". The exhibition also includes five other select works created between 1968-1971 that have not been on public display for over 40 years and that are definitive examples of the artist's connection to sound, space, music and movement.

You are the object; you are the art; you are the universe. It belongs to you; it’s yourself. Energy is the issue of . . . the unity of time, matter, space. – Jesús Rafael Soto in Soto

Jesús Rafael Soto’s work is an attempt to visually articulate the immaterial. A seemingly paradoxical pursuit, Soto seized the space between the work and the viewer in an effort to illuminate the natural world’s ephemeral properties by creating an inextricable link between an art-object and its subject. By highlighting the role of human perception as a vital component to his artwork, Soto creates a bridge or continuum for his work that carries beyond the object by extending itself into the human mind. This recently uncovered film depicts Soto demonstrating the role of the viewer/subject.

In 2009, Sandro Bosi and his gallery director, Ilaria Caravaglio were in Italy researching the provenance of a Soto work titled “Murale Panoramico Sonoro”. Through the process of trying to authenticate the artwork, Bosi and Caravaglio discovered a film in the Italian film archive, Cineteca Nazionale, entitled Soto and produced for a 1968 Soto exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery in Rome, Italy. This film, to be exhibited side by side with selected works, is an exciting and rare example of the artist interacting with “Murale Panoramico Sonoro”, The Hirshorn collection’s “Two Volumes in the Virtual” and other pieces, particularly exploring the intersection of his sculpture’s sound capabilities with music. In the film, Soto is seen "playing" his works along with contextualizing key elements of sound, viewer participation, and movement associated with his work.

SOTO UNEARTHED: A 1968 Film and Selected Early Works will also present four sculptures and one wall painting from varying series’ of Jesús Rafael Soto’s practice during the years of 1968 through 1971. The works chosen for this exhibition will include examples of Progressione (“progression”), Estencion (“extension”), Penetrable (“penetrable”), Murale (“mural”), as well as an abstract kinetic painting. Each of these sculpture-types explores ways that the material world interacts with and is influenced by both human perception and immaterial properties such as movement, sound, light, and gravity.