The online Catalogue Raisonné for Oswaldo Vigas has officially begun, according to the Oswaldo Vigas Foundation. Oswaldo Vigas (1923–2014) was a pioneering Venezuelan artist who drew inspiration from the magical and mystical aspects of Latin American culture to create a distinctive aesthetic vocabulary. You may watch the catalog here as well as a two-minute video guide.
This website is the first comprehensive online Catalogue Raisonné of any modern or contemporary artist from Venezuela, and was meticulously studied by the Oswaldo Vigas Foundation with the assistance of Axel Stein, head of the Latin American Art Department at Sotheby’s from 2011 to 2018. By making the material available online for free access by academics, curators, collectors, and the general public, the document will help preserve Vigas’s artistic legacy.
“With more than 3000 paintings catalogued, numbered, with their corresponding complete gallery and museum exhibition history, published literature in catalogues, books and periodicals, the complete online Catalogue Raisonné of Oswaldo Vigas is the indispensable tool to fully understand the artist’s trajectory,” said Axel Stein. “The presence of any work in the Catalogue is an ironclad guarantee of its authenticity,” he added.
The Central University of Venezuela (UCV) murals, which Vigas created during his time in Paris in the 1950s and 1960s and which are now recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site, are the culmination of his Parisian period. This online resource will also help readers understand the inspiration behind Vigas’s later works, which he produced from the time he returned to Venezuela in 1964 until his death in 2014. Watch the video here.
On September 15, 2022, philanthropist, art historian, and curator Estrellita Brodsky sponsored a celebration for the Oswaldo Vigas Foundation in her “Another Space” in Chelsea, New York, to mark the publication of the artist’s Catalogue Raisonné.
About The Oswaldo Vigas Foundation
The Oswaldo Vigas Foundation, a non-profit institution based in Caracas, Venezuela, is dedicated to promoting a greater understanding of Oswaldo Vigas’s creative out-put encouraging research on his work, life, reflections and sources of inspiration. The Foundation aims to preserve, promote, and keep a selection of the work of the artist together and approachable to public institutions, curators, writers, and art lovers.