Untitled

Alejandro Puente

1967 · Acrylic on canvas · Modern and Contemporary Art

Puente was at the fore of a group of artists from La Plata, Argentina, who shared with American Minimalist and Conceptual artists of the 1960s a devotion to the rigorous exploration of systems of color and form. This composition reflects Puente’s preference for the primary colors as they appear unmixed on a color wheel. Arranged together, four equilateral triangles make up a single, larger triangle, with the three primary colors radiating out from an anchor in black. An even white strip runs along two sides of each triangle, suggesting a state of incompleteness while also creating the perimeter of the overall composition. As this composite work suggests, the abstract vocabularies practiced by La Plata artists effectively abandoned traditional painting by embracing the shaped canvas, the support assuming its own identity in space as an object.

Artist

Alejandro Puente

Date

1967

Medium

Acrylic on canvas

Department

Modern and Contemporary Art

Credit line

Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 2016