ISLAA Spotlights is a series of focused presentations that highlight pivotal works from the collection across our programmatic spaces. These displays create opportunities for close engagement with artists and ideas that remain underrepresented in dominant art historical narratives, offering a platform to explore individual practices in greater depth.

Spotlight presentations are open during select hours and by appointment. To inquire about a tour or visit, please contact us at info@islaa.org.

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The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) is pleased to present Los Sobrevivientes (1963) by Argentine artist Alfredo Hlito (1923–1993) as part of the Spotlight series.

Hlito was an influential artist and writer whose paintings put his theories of aesthetics and perception to practice. His early fascination with art led him to study at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, where he honed his skills as a painter. His early work paid homage to the hieroglyphic style of Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García, though Hlito gradually pared down color and shape as he progressed toward a more abstract sense of composition. By the mid-1940s, he was an integral part of the Concrete Art movement, an international artistic movement that emphasized, through geometric abstraction, the reduction of art to its most essential functions. Hlito was a founding member of the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención in 1945, and a year later coauthored the “Concrete Invention Manifesto,” laying the foundation for Concretism’s prominence in the global art scene.

During this period, Hlito’s work was characterized by the use of broad color fields and sharp geometric figures, which became emblematic of the movement. In 1948, he and his Concretist peers participated in Paris’s Salon des Réalités Nouvelles and the landmark New Realities exhibition at Galería van Riel in Buenos Aires. Continually situating his artistic practice within a theoretical framework, in 1951 he cofounded the Nueva Visión magazine with Tomás Maldonado. In 1954 he received the Acquisition Award from the II São Paulo Biennial, and the following year he participated in the XXVIII Venice Biennale.

Hlito’s groundbreaking work in the 1950s laid the groundwork for Op art, a style that, when it emerged in the 1960s, pushed the boundaries of optical experimentation and the transformative potential of geometric abstraction, taking optical illusion and perceptual mechanics as its catalyst. The eight works on display, all part of Hlito’s series Espectros (Specters), were created between 1959 and 1961, a fertile period that marked his transition from Concretism to exploring the interplay of color and form in a more nuanced manner. Taking on new considerations of perspective and distance, Op art brought with it a recognition of the subjective position and sensibility from which a work was viewed, and the foundations at which brushstrokes begin to constitute a recognizable form. For the works on view here, this constituted a stripping down of images to their most basic building blocks, through a brushy pointillism that feels both mannered and raw.

—Nolan Kelly