Juan Carlos Maldonado Collection: Urban Forms

"Urban Forms" is an exhibition in which the Juan Carlos Maldonado Collection (JCMC) seeks to identify some of the formal, technical, and theoretical links that integrate the recently acquired photographic selection into the already extensive work of universal geometric abstraction that shapes and characterizes the collection. The exhibition comprises a series of images by Paolo Gasparini, an Italian-Venezuelan photographer, who documents some of the modern efforts in the field of architecture, especially in Brazil and Venezuela. It gives us the opportunity to perceive and study the numerous points of contact that exist between architectural experiences and pictorial practices throughout the 20th century, particularly in the middle part of the century, as well as within the field of abstraction. This is because the obvious formal closeness we observe among these works is not due to mere coincidences, but rather to the undeniable traces of shared pursuits that the continent’s visual artists and modern architects experienced during that period – just as their European counterparts who preceded and influenced them experienced, from the German Bauhaus and Dutch Neoplasticism to the Soviet avant-garde. Thus, "Urban Forms" constitutes an invitation from JCMC to reconsider a long and complex process, one in which visual artists and architects, sometimes in parallel and sometimes in close collaboration, worked to envision the forms of the modern city.