The gift of a painter is to slow time and make it remain forever in an instant, yet infinitely relevant. Oswaldo Vigas (1923–2014) was a masterful painter of modernist abstraction gifted with astonishing vigor. Vigas’s artistic valor and dedication earned him a place alongside the most significant modernist painters, and his paintings will most certainly endure for generations to come.
Born in Venezuela, Vigas’s, success ultimately propelled him to live a consequential portion of his life in Paris. There he would gain entry into a select group of Europe’s most preeminent painters and become associated with such notables as Fernand Léger, Max Ernst, Wilfredo Lam, and Pablo Picasso. Over the years, pictures by Vigas would be exhibited extensively internationally and acquired for permanent collections of various museums. He represented Venezuela in the XXVII Venice Biennial of 1954, and some of his public works have even earned the designation of a UNESCO World Heritage Cultural Site. However, it was in Vigas’s relentless quest to imbue his personal aesthetic style with archaic Pre-Columbian pictographs, as well as his Mestizo identity, that one-century Modernism.
