Latin American Master Drawings

Tarsila do Amaral

Marcelo Bonevardi

Agustín Fernández

Roberto Matta

Leon Tovar Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in Master Drawings 2020 with the opening of Latin American Master Drawings. Building on the success of the Gallery’s fall 2019 survey on the work of Marcelo Bonevardi, Leon Tovar presents a focused examination of the artist’s works on paper. In a 1964 review of a group exhibition at the Bonino Gallery, the critic John Canaday wrote in the New York Times that Bonevardi’s paintings show “an artist of imagination and a craftsman of skill”—this attention to detail resonates with equal force in his mysterious drawings. Executed in a variety of mark-making techniques, Bonevardi translates his interest in architectural spaces into haunting visions reminiscent of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s “Imaginary Prisons.” Deliberate and methodical linework betrays the artist’s past as a student of architecture, while scumbled, dark, and urgent marks are anxious and emotional accompaniments to the foreboding hooks and ropes that populate his buildings. Highlights include Stone 1 (1981), a tower of wood, stone, and spikes that was exhibited as part of Art and Alchemy during the 1986 Venice Biennial.

Accompanying this presentation of Bonevardi’s drawings will be other exciting works on paper that bring together a rich selection of Latin America’s foremost draftsmen. Prominent among them is the Cuban artist Agustín Fernández, whose dreamlike graphite drawings pit organic shapes against apparatuses of control, and Tarsila do Amaral, who was the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2018.