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Gerd LeufertErebos1991
1991
About the Item
Gerd Leufert
Title: Erebos
Signed, titled, dated ‘91 and inscribed P/A in pencil (lower center)
Screenprint on paper
23⅝ by 22⅜ in. / 60 by 56.8 cm.
Executed in 1991, this work is an artist’s proof from an edition of 35 plus 1 artist’s proof.
Provenance: Private Collection, Venezuela - Acquired from the above by the present owner - Sotheby's Auction
“The first duty of the creator: restlessness,” Gerd Leufert wrote in 1985, looking back on his 30-year career as an artist, designer, museum worker, and professor of art in Venezuela.1 Bridging the worlds of commerce and culture in Caracas, Leufert’s impact on art and design owed to his interdisciplinary approach: the influence of cutting-edge developments in abstract art appeared in his graphic design, while the efficiency and bold contrast of mid-century design characterized his paintings.
An immigrant born in German-controlled Lithuania at the cusp of the first World War, Leufert studied arts and design in Hannover, Mainz, and, finally, in Munich with the German typographer Fritz H. Ehmcke. In 1951, Leufert emigrated to Venezuela, where he first applied his training to advertising. He was in good company: US-based ad agencies had become havens for artists, who found employment in satellite offices recently opened in Caracas to service corporate development buoyed by Venezuela’s oil boom. The energy business would prove a source of important patronage for Leufert, who managed the design identity of the cultural magazine El Farol, a publication of the Creole Petroleum Corporation, as its creative director in the late 1950s.
Leufert cultivated his artistic career alongside that of his life partner, the Hamburg-born artist Gertrud Goldschmid, better known as Gego. Leufert and Gego met within a year of his arrival in Caracas, before retreating to the small town of Tarma, where they collaborated between 1953 and 1956. In the 1960s, he supported her public sculpture practice: “Whenever they asked me to do something outside,” Gego recalled, “the work was born as a joint effort…. It is very productive because Gerd was the designer and I was the architect so our ideas converged well.”2 Leufert also designed the promotional materials for many of Gego’s exhibitions.
During his years in Tarma, Leufert began experimenting with abstract paintings, creating compositions like No. 234 (1954) and Untitled (1955) that recall the shattered perspective and overlapping planes of Cubism. In later paintings, Leufert abandoned any reference to recognizable forms, approaching a pure abstraction through a designer’s economical means. The monochrome painting AM-13 (1961) references Kazimir Malevich’s *Suprematist Composition: White on White from 1918, as well as the transcendent, light-washed abstract landscapes of the eccentric Venezuelan painter Armando Reverón. Rather than building up layers of paint, Leufert scraped away at the center of the wood panel, a process that echoes the whittled forms of his logos and brand identities. Nenias, an artist’s book from the late 1960s featuring 20 abstract forms that resemble rounded Rorschach tests, shows the direction of Leufert’s art and design.3 In 1984, he scaled up these brandless logos to a monumental size and applied them directly to the walls of the Museum of Fine Arts in Caracas.
Leufert’s impact on design in Venezuela was also due to his involvement with key institutions—such as the Museum of Fine Arts—that supported the advancement of the discipline. Between 1961 and 1973, Leufert designed exhibitions and publications at the museum, later working there as a curator of drawing and graphic design. Beginning in the late 1950s, he taught design in Caracas: first at the school of architecture and urbanism at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, and later at the country’s premier art school, the Escuela de Artes Plásticas Cristóbal Rojas. In 1964, he cofounded Venezuela’s first school dedicated to design, the Instituto de Diseño de la Fundación Neumann. “Professional consciousness of graphic design in Venezuela truly occurred with [Gerd] Leufert,” asserted Carlos Cruz-Diez, an originator of Venezuelan abstract and kinetic art. “What existed before was merely drawing.”4
Source: MoMa
- Creator:Gerd Leufert (1914 - 1998, Lithuanian, Venezuelan)
- Creation Year:1991
- Dimensions:Height: 23.6 in (59.95 cm)Width: 22.38 in (56.85 cm)Depth: 1 in (2.54 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:This work is in good condition overall. The sheet is affixed verso to the backing board with a foam core mount. The media layer is stable, the ink is rich in tone and the color is vibrant.
- Gallery Location:Miami, FL
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU2519214362802
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