We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Olga Albizu's Lyrical Abstraction and the Borders of the Canvas.
- Authors
Flecha Vega, Raquel
- Abstract
The abstractionist paintings of Puerto Rican artist Olga Albizu (1924–2005) gained prominence in the late 1950s when her work debuted in galleries across the Americas and entered the commercial music industry with RCA and Verve records. However, existing scholarship has failed to capture the complex relationship between Albizu's anti-commercial abstractionist aesthetic and its mass reproduction as cover art for vinyl records during the Cold War era. Returning to the canvas to explore the iconographic, formal, and aesthetic qualities of Albizu's work within its sociohistorical post-World War II context, this study reveals Albizu's devotion to formal borders, vivid color juxtapositions, and compositional tensions. I argue that Albizu's practice constitutes an ongoing concern with a Modernist dialectic and ideals about subjective transformation in a postmodern world of mass culture, a message she conveyed through the material and experiential borders of the canvas. As an avowed formalist and Modernist existing between the postcolonial and postmodern worlds of San Juan and New York City, her work merits formal scrutiny. This paper will add to the diverse histories of Abstract Expressionism and mid-century Modernisms across the Americas while shedding light on an important post-war historical moment and artistic impulse that held on to anti-commercial values in an all-encompassing consumerist world.
- Subjects
NEW York (N.Y.); SAN Juan (P.R.); ABSTRACT expressionism; COLD War, 1945-1991; POPULAR culture; CANVAS; PHONOGRAPH records; ART reproduction
- Publication
Arts (2076-0752), 2023, Vol 12, Issue 1, p20
- ISSN
2076-0752
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.3390/arts12010020