Edgar Negret

Edgar Negret was born in Popayán, Colombia, in 1920 and studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Cali. Meeting the Basque sculptor Jorge de Oteiza in 1944 opened him to modern sculpture. After a first stay in New York, he spent 1950 to 1955 in Europe — Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, Mallorca — before living in New York from 1955 to 1963, among the artists of Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan.

Magic machines

In New York Negret developed his Aparatos mágicos, or magic machines: aluminium sculptures assembled from industrial parts, painted in flat colour, with the nuts and bolts left visible as part of the design. The Museum of Modern Art had already acquired one of his painted iron works in 1954, the year it was made. Back in Bogotá from 1963, where he led the sculpture department of the Universidad de los Andes, he extended this vocabulary into series of couplings, bridges, navigators and stairs.

Suns and Andean memory

A journey to Cuzco and Machu Picchu in 1980 brought Inca references and stronger colour into his work. The Sol sculptures belong to this period: bands of painted aluminium twisted around a centre, evoking the sun god Inti and the paper garlands of Colombian festivities, meant to be seen from every side. A Sol of 1985 is in the collection of the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, and monumental suns stand in Santa Cruz de Tenerife (1995) and at Medellín’s international airport (2005).

Recognition

Negret won the David E. Bright Prize for sculpture at the 1968 Venice Biennale and showed at documenta 4 in Kassel the same year; a Guggenheim Fellowship followed in 1975, and his Metamorfosis was erected in Seoul’s Olympic Park for the 1988 Games. His work is held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, the RISD Museum in Providence, the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach and the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá. In 1985 he opened the Casa Museo Negret in his family home in Popayán. He died in Bogotá in 2012.