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Lot Essay
“Art is a space where I am free,” Hasper once pronounced, and her signature abstractions—exuberantly colorful and kaleidoscopic—attest to the creative freedoms that she has embraced across more than three decades. “I know I have a retro image,” she acknowledges. “I work with Madí images, with the ideas of the Concreto-Invención Movement—things that took place 50 years ago.” Hasper emerged in the 1990s as part of a generation of Argentine artists—among them Pablo Siquier, Fabio Kacero, and Jorge Gumier Maier—who resisted older models of gesture painting and conceptualism, instead privileging questions of form and aesthetics. In recovering the mid-century history of the Grupo Madí, led by Carmelo Arden Quin and Gyula Kosice among others, she has continued its legacy of playful invention and geometric abstraction. “I gravitated almost unconsciously toward Madí,” Hasper recalls. “They were promoting a kind of abstract thought that in the early 1940s was very radical, in the way the Russian Constructivists, the Bauhaus, and De Stijl were revolutionary. In Argentina, abstraction was repressed because it did not ‘explain’ national values. It had no value. So I adopted something that had no value and tried to make it valuable, an act of resistance” (in “Graciela Hasper interviewed by Lilly Wei,” Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas 35, no. 65, 2002, p. 42-3 and 47).
Bold and prismatic, the colors of the present Untitled swirl across the canvas in rhythmic curves, the geometries fluid and interconnected. “I have always painted circles and rectangles, their variations and deformations,” Hasper notes. “I associate the orthogonal shape with civilization, with construction, with the city, with the house. The cube is dwelling. And round shapes are the geometrical figures found in nature. The square is a human invention, but nature is full of circles: the sun, the moon, the planets, water drops. And the circle is also endless…this is linked to some sort of mystical thinking. All abstract artists have an issue with this, with the absolute, with nothingness” (in M.A. García, “Forms of Continuity,” Hasper, Buenos Aires, 2007, p. 145). Form and color take on immersive, monumental proportions in her paintings, raising questions both existential and phenomenological in kind. “I’m trying to expand the boundaries of painting in order to include the body, so I’m making really big pieces,” she explains. “When you work on a large scale, you have a physical relationship to what you're doing. You’re inside. I’m investigating that physical relationship…You experience the materiality of the work, and you’re surrounded by it” (in “Graciela Hasper interviewed by Lilly Wei,” op. cit., pp. 45-6).
Hasper has created numerous site-specific installations, notably at the Chinati Foundation (Marfa, 2002), the Faena Forum (Miami Beach, 2016), the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (2017), and Art Basel Miami Beach (2019). In 2022, she held a solo retrospective at the Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes Franklin Rawson (San Juan, Argentina) and participated in the group exhibition, Vida Abstracta, at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
Bold and prismatic, the colors of the present Untitled swirl across the canvas in rhythmic curves, the geometries fluid and interconnected. “I have always painted circles and rectangles, their variations and deformations,” Hasper notes. “I associate the orthogonal shape with civilization, with construction, with the city, with the house. The cube is dwelling. And round shapes are the geometrical figures found in nature. The square is a human invention, but nature is full of circles: the sun, the moon, the planets, water drops. And the circle is also endless…this is linked to some sort of mystical thinking. All abstract artists have an issue with this, with the absolute, with nothingness” (in M.A. García, “Forms of Continuity,” Hasper, Buenos Aires, 2007, p. 145). Form and color take on immersive, monumental proportions in her paintings, raising questions both existential and phenomenological in kind. “I’m trying to expand the boundaries of painting in order to include the body, so I’m making really big pieces,” she explains. “When you work on a large scale, you have a physical relationship to what you're doing. You’re inside. I’m investigating that physical relationship…You experience the materiality of the work, and you’re surrounded by it” (in “Graciela Hasper interviewed by Lilly Wei,” op. cit., pp. 45-6).
Hasper has created numerous site-specific installations, notably at the Chinati Foundation (Marfa, 2002), the Faena Forum (Miami Beach, 2016), the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (2017), and Art Basel Miami Beach (2019). In 2022, she held a solo retrospective at the Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes Franklin Rawson (San Juan, Argentina) and participated in the group exhibition, Vida Abstracta, at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park