Leonardo Nierman

Volcanic Fury

Autumn Wind SOLD

Oil on Panel

Oil on Panel

Image size 32 x 24

Image size 16 x 24

Leonardo Nierman is the greatest living abstract painter in Latin America. For over forty years this "Jackson Pollock" of Mexico has been celebrated by museums and connoisseurs the world over for his cosmic "landscapes" which brilliantly fuse the inner world of the soul and the mind's eye with the stellar universe.

Educated with a Bachelor of Science degree in physics from the University of Mexico in 1951, Nierman is the master of kaleidoscopic abstraction. With the eloquence of a Matta or Tamayo, he depicts man's soul and intellect projecting into outer and inner space. His cosmic gases and starry dramas become metaphors for the "millions of sparks, impulses, hopes, dreams, images, inner fires, passions, fears and joys" that animate us within, even as we . . . .. . soar inside of an expanding universe.

Fantastic speed, primeval nature, and a music of the spheres resonate within the works, which are mediated, in some cases, by a layer of geometric lines suggesting again this meeting of nature and science: mankind in the laboratory, spaceship, astronomic observatory. Turbulent energy, mineral geometry and a collision of nature and intellect animate these classic canvases.

Then again, Nierman's lushly rendered, textural surfaces and hot-to-cool ochre and sky-blue palette can be seen as conceptual landscapes which fuse the seismic, volcanic terrain of great Mexico--its flames, smoke, rugged lava beds and swirling tropical skies--with the art of painting itself. Like the great Rufino Tamayo before him, Nierman's work, not only thematically but physically, seems to query over and over, what is man's connection to the cosmos; how are we united with the heavens; what is a creature, what is a heavenly body? How are they different; how the same? Where are we going together?

SELECTED MUSEUM COLLECTIONS

¥ Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, London, England

¥ Vatican Museum of Contemporary Art & Vatican Gardens, Rome, Italy

¥ Art Institute of Chicago, IL

¥ Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

¥ Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, MA

¥ Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City, Mexico

¥ Detroit Institute of Fine Arts, Ml

¥ Museums of Modern Art, Haifa and Tel Aviv, Israel

¥ Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art, Madrid, Spain