Jorge Riveros “Emotional Geometries”

Leon Tovar Gallery (152 W 25th St.)

This event has ended.

When the painter Jorge Riveros returned to Colombia in 1975, he did so as an artist different from the one who departed the country just over a decade earlier. The former student and teacher of figurative painting, whose eyes occasionally wandered toward imported European avant-garde experiments, arrived in his native country bearing the marks of a new abstract sensibility. He had been living, working, and exhibiting in Germany, where the remnants of earlier international dialogues on abstraction began to exert their influence upon him. Riveros would continue this dialogue after his return to South America, but following in the footsteps of his hero Joaquín Torres-García, would attempt to synthesize European traditions with South America’s own abstract lineage apparent in indigenous artistry. In recent years, the artist has come to gain the attention that his work deserves, and more about his art historical genealogy has come to the fore. Leon Tovar, who has previously included the artist in several group shows, is once again pleased to welcome Riveros’s paintings to New York for his first solo exhibition at the Gallery. The work on view encompasses both early and more recently completed canvases, as well as several examples of Riveros’s preliminary plans. Many of these often colorful and nearly fully developed preparatory sketches were painted while the artist was still living in Germany, and have only been realized in the past several years.