Carlos Cruz-Diez

The Franco-Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez lived and worked in Paris since 1960. He is a major protagonist in the field of Kinetic and Optical art, a movement that encourages “an awareness of the instability of reality.” His body of work has established him as one of the key 20th century thinkers in the realm of color.

Carlos Cruz-Diez’s visual art explores the perception of color as an autonomous reality evolving in space and time, unaided by form or support, in a perpetual present.

His artworks are housed in permanent collections of prestigious institutions such as:

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York

Tate Modern, London

Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

Centre Pompidou, Paris

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne

In my works, color appears and disappears during the course of a dialogue with real space and time. What also emerges is the undeniable fact that the information we have acquired and the knowledge we have memorized throughout our lifetime are, probably, not true… at least to some extent.

When we view color through an “elementary prism” that has been stripped of pre-existing meanings, it can awaken other sensory perception mechanisms that are more subtle and complex than those that have been ingrained in us by our cultural conditioning and the constant, ubiquitous barrage of information we face in our contemporary society.

Carlos Cruz-Diez

Reflexión sobre el color [Reflection on Color], Fundación Juan March 2009

[ed. or. 1989]