María Freire

Considered one of the key figures of abstract and concrete expression in her country, María Freire has experienced a very long, articulated career, which has seen her engaged as a painter, sculptor, art critic, teacher, co-founder of important groups such as the Grupo de Arte No Figurativo, created in 1952. His work originates from a reflection on African and South American 'primitive' art, which inspires the series of masks created at the beginning and guides his research - as has already happened for some of the exponents of Historical avant-gardes - towards the territories of formal synthesis. Her expressive progress in this area has important repercussions on painting: the artist soon manages to organize plastic fields in which color and form are offered as objective data of a language purified from any naturalistic reference. Her works, initially characterized by the contrast of black and white, later welcome the primary colors and then a broad spectrum of colors, returned through their timbral values. At the same time, her forms detach themselves from their geometric matrix to gain full iconographic freedom, and become the lemmas of her personal visual vocabulary. Freire's pictorial work is rigidly articulated in thematic series, on which the artist worked until the possibilities of meaning were exhausted. Some of the best known are represented by the paintings included in the collection. Among these, we note Cordoba: founded on an impeccable compositional system, the work manages to recall, as indeed the cycle from which it is drawn, figural elements attributable to the ancient cultures of South America.