Soto: Vibrations 1950-1960

The decisive first decade of kinetic pioneer Soto, in a beautifully produced volume with a printed mylar cover

Renowned as a founder of kinetic art, Soto (1923-2005) explored the disintegration of the art object, breaking new ground while anticipating conceptual strategies to come. Soto: Vibrations 1950-1960, the first publication to focus on the critical first decade of the Venezuelan artist’s life in Paris, follows Soto’s career from his earliest Mondrian-inspired paintings restricted to pure yellows, reds, blues and greens to his plexiglass paintings that draw on the experiments of Duchamp and Moholy-Nagy. Imbued with vibration and movement, Soto’s early works constitute a breakthrough in his output, laying crucial groundwork for his later kinetic works and the fluid style that shaped his artistic vocabulary.

Soto aimed to engage viewers as active participants in the process of perception and experimented with the serial repetition of color and geometric forms in an effort to create optical vibrations and what he referred to as the displacement of the viewer.