Alejandro Otero

(b El Manteco, 7 March 1921; d Caracas, 13 July 1990). Venezuelan painter and sculptor. He began studying at the Escuela de Artes Pl?sticas y Aplicadas, Caracas, in 1939 and in the following year won a prize in the First Venezuelan Official Art Salon. In 1945 he went to New York and to Washington, DC, where he exhibited figurative works at the Pan American Union. He moved to Paris in 1948, and by 1949 he had completed his series of Coffee Pots (e.g. Blue Coffee Pot, 1947; Caracas, Gal. A. N.), which marked his transition to a gestural abstraction controlled by linear elements. He was a founder-member of the Los Disidentes group. In Paris he became interested in geometric abstraction, concerned with the optical effects of squares and grids, as in Colourhythm 1 (1955; New York, MOMA). This interest dominated his work throughout the 1950s and is reflected in his project to integrate his murals with Carlos Ra?l Villanueva's architecture (1952) in the Engineering Faculty of the Ciudad Universitaria, Caracas. In 1958 Otero was awarded the National Prize for Painting in the Official Salon, and in 1959 he represented Venezuela in the Biennale of S?o Paulo, receiving an honourable mention. In the 1960s he abandoned painting in order to work on a larger scale in his 'civic sculptures', such as Delta Solar (Washington, DC, N. Air & Space Mus.). He also produced collages of objets trouv?s, as in Page Picture No. 1 (paper on wood, 1964; priv. col., see Boulton, 1966, fig. 33).

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