Henrique Faria is pleased to present Imaginary Spaces, Gerd Leufert’s second solo show at the gallery that spans his multifaceted career as an artist and designer in Venezuela to coincide with the first major US museum retrospective since 2005 of Gego, his life partner, at the Guggenheim. The exhibition brings together a selection of drawings, paintings, sculptures and an installation shown for the first time in the United States.

Leufert worked in many mediums throughout his life, including engraving, printmaking, sculpture, photography, painting and drawing, and to these materials he applied his interest in modern design, typography and color, thereby creating a diverse and dynamic body of work. The works in the front room from the series Nenias, with a stark gestalt of black forms on white backgrounds, take the form of ideograms or graphisms–another example of Leufert’s affinity for graphic design and typography. The Nenias conjure a visual tension in the viewer as the forms created both elude and suggest semantic content, while their contemporary method of production–silkscreen, lithography and digital projection–contrasts with the figures’ enigmatic aura. The series of Listonados and the selection of acrylic paintings, which are on view in the back gallery, also evoke a tension in the viewer, but in this case through Leufert’s playful use of positive and negative space and the optical effects generated from his use of color. Executed in the late 60s through the early 70s, the Listonados brought painting off of the canvas onto the frame itself and transformed the frame into a sculptural support.

As Ruth Auerbach writes in the exhibition text "The series New York Drawings (1963) comprises a significant group of graphite drawings in which Leufert formalized a rigorous reflection on the geometry of the circle that he would later develop into large-scale canvases. One such painting, Union Square (1964), is highlighted in the current exhibition for its radial composition and its subtle range of color. Likewise, the exhibition includes two important paintings of acrylic on canvas, Tijoque VII and Tijoque, VI both from 1965 and presented at the Eighth São Paulo Biennial, which stand as examples of an investigation that announced the expansion of his chromatic range and the ambiguity of a constructive geometry made vulnerable by the emotion and tension produced between movement and calm."

Leufert's extensive visual production reconciled two apparently opposite extremes of creation: he rigorously assembled the social and communicative function of design with the sensitive nature of artistic expression until he reached, without contradictions, a liberating dialectic of art.

Gerd Leufert (Memel, 1914 – Caracas, 1998) attended the Akademie der Bildenden Künste (Academy of Fine Arts) in Munich in 1939 where he studied graphic design, and became a member of the Werkbund, an interdisciplinary association founded on the social importance of design and craftsmanship. He worked for several German publishing houses, and upon migrating to Caracas, Venezuela, in 1951, continued to work as a designer. Leufert’s contribution to visual culture, graphic design, and museology is paramount in Venezuela. He was credited with bringing the rigor of German design principles to the country, and was well regarded for his work as an art and graphic design teacher in various Caracas educational institutions. Over the next four decades Leufert participated in solo and group exhibitions in Germany, France, Holland, Colombia, the United States and Mexico.

From 1961 to 1973, Leufert worked at the Museo de Bellas Artes (Museum of Fine Arts), Caracas, first as a designer, rebranding the museum’s visual identity, and later as the curator of drawings and graphic design. In 1990 he was awarded Venezuela’s Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas (National Fine Arts Prize), followed by an exhibition of his photographs at Sala RG, Caracas. In the last years of his life, Leufert continued to exhibit his drawings and photographs at Centro Cultural Consolidado, Caracas (1992), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Maracay Mario Abreu (1992), and Museo de Bellas Artes (1994–95).