Carlos Cruz-Diez: Couleur Additive 2

Carlos Cruz-Diez: Couleur Additive 2 (2008)
 
Silkscreen on paper, 60 x 60 cm, edition of 60, hand-signed and numbered. Edition Konkret, Sulzburg (GER).
 
Carlos Cruz-Diez (1923–2019) was a Venezuelan-French artist who played a central role in the development of Kinetic and Op art. Born in Caracas and trained at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Aplicadas there (graduating in 1945), he settled in Paris in 1960, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life. Alongside Jesús Rafael Soto and Alejandro Otero, he helped shape Venezuela's modernist avant-garde and became one of the most important figures of postwar abstraction.
 
From the late 1950s onward, Cruz-Diez treated colour not as a descriptive tool but as an autonomous, evolving event unfolding in space and time. He developed a series of celebrated bodies of work — among them the Physichromies, Chromointerférences, Inductions Chromatiques and the Couleur Additive — through which he sought to liberate colour from form and to make perception itself a participatory experience. In the Couleur Additive series, finely spaced coloured lines interact so that new, unstable hues appear to be generated in the eye of the moving viewer.
 
His work is held in major international collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and was the subject of immersive Chromosaturation environments shown worldwide. Among many honours he received the National Prize of Plastic Arts of Venezuela (1971), was named Officier of the Légion d'Honneur (2012) and awarded the Turner Medal for Colour (2015). "Couleur Additive 2" distils his lifelong inquiry: colour as pure, living energy, activated through the act of looking.