The Artist Acquired from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is warmer and more vibrant in the original. The illustration fails to fully convey the white colour of the painted metal rods and the sculptural, mobile nature of the original. Condition: This work is in very good and original condition. Extremely close inspection reveals some minor and light wear to the bottom two corners of the board. Further close inspection reveals some intermittent, short and unobtrusive hairline cracks in places to the wooden board, which have arisen over time as a result of the natural ageing of the wooden veneer. There are a few specks of media scattered throughout. Further extremely close inspection reveals a few minute losses, one towards the bottom left corner, and three specks to the black pigment at the centre right side of the board. The metal mobile elements of the work appear undistorted. There are a few scattered fly spots on a couple of the metal rods. There is a minor kink in one nylon thread at the very top of the hanging support. Inspection under ultra violet light reveals four horizontal short lines that fluoresce slightly darker, towards the lower right corner.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

A visionary presence in Europe and the United States throughout the latter half of the Twentieth Century, Jesús Rafael Soto was the prototypical artist-engineer. From a studied appreciation of how pictorial, illusionary space functioned in the works of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, Soto’s breakthrough practice extracted the fundamental principles that underpinned the evolution of Modernism – the flattening of the picture plane and the objectification of painting – into an aesthetic vocabulary that challenged the conventions of the genre. Curvas Blancas, executed in 1976 – two years after Soto’s mid-career retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York – is an exceptional example of Soto’s artistic project; meditating on line and form, the present work expresses the frenzy of a gestural sketch with the serene architecture that typifies the artist’s oeuvre. Regarded as one of the founding fathers of Kinetic art, the Venezuelan-born Soto was a pioneer involved closely with the avant-gardist developments of the Nouveaux Realistes in Paris, led by Yves Klein, and the Dusseldorf-based ZERO group, founded by Heinz Mack and Otto Piene. Soto’s practice is unmistakably unique, synthesising Euclidean geometry and the spatio-temporal equivalences of Albert Einstein’s Relativity with the formal language of Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian. What emerges is a near-scientific demonstration of aesthetic refinement, an immaculate illustration of Soto’s profound advancements in contemporary art. Moving to Paris in 1950 at the age of 27, Soto’s commitment to defining a new set of visual terms led him to 'dynamize' those works by Mondrian that meant most to [him], since [Soto] decided the problem was one of giving them movement” (Jesús Rafael Soto in conversation with Claude-Louis Renard in: Exh. Cat., New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Soto: A Retrospective Exhibition, 1974, p. 14). The dynamism that is central to Soto’s research is necessarily linked to his Modernist predecessors, but the artist was in devoted dialogue with his contemporaries who shared his relentless determination to explore new terrain – appealing to Alexander Calder’s mobiles and closely linked to Lucio Fontana’s tagli. Where the formal rigidity of Cubism and geometric painting had reached its zenith, in Curvas Blancas Soto advances into an expanded field of painting, the curvilinear batons tracing a multidimensional arc across the flat plane of the panel and projecting forth into the real space of the spectator. In a fantastic contradistinction to Fontana, who pierced the canvas to access the fictional space beyond, not only did Soto’s work shatter the figure-ground of traditional painting, but it redefined such spatial terms through phenomenological experience. As art historian Ariel Jiménez notes, “much of what makes Soto’s structures interesting is… what they suggest or attempt to make visible: the dimension, as such, of the sublime” (Ariel Jiménez, Jesús Soto in Conversation with Ariel Jiménez, New York 2011, p. 34). The optically illusory nature of Curvas Blancas produces a mesmeric, dematerialised and incessantly shifting structure; transfiguring the energy of geometric and Cubist linearity into a weightless framework of darting particles.