About Soto

Born in Ciudad Bolivar, Venezuela, in 1923, Jesús Rafael Soto was one of the leading exponents of Kinetic art – art that moves or appears to move.

From 1947 onwards, while working as head of the Escuela de Artes Plásticas in Maracaibo, Soto heard of and began to take an interest in geometric abstraction, a concept that originated in Europe.

Using this device, in 1957, he produced the first of his Vibrations series –

works made by setting a tangle of metal wires or materials found in the street against a striped black and white ground to create a moiré effect.

Taking this concept to extremes & systematizing this method, Soto superimposes various elements on striped backgrounds: suspended mobile rods, metal squares or what he calls “Tes” – small T-shaped pieces of metal that appear and disappear as the viewer moves, offering a glimpse of an interstitial space that vibrates or oscillates between the visible and the invisible, the material and the immaterial.

Soto was commissioned to make numerous monumental works for public spaces and buildings all over the world.

These included UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris (1969), the Grand Hall de la Régie Renault, also in Paris (1975), the Royal Bank of Canada in Toronto (1977), the Centro Benaven, in Caracas (1979), and the Volume Virtuel at the Centre Pompidou (1987).

In 1973, with the aid of his architect friend Carlos Raul Villanueva, Soto built the Museo de Arte Moderno Jesús Soto in his native city of Ciudad Bolivar to house the sizeable collection of geometric and kinetic works he amassed throughout his life. The museum also contains many of Soto’s own most important works.

There have been many retrospectives of Soto’s work,

including one that was initially shown at the Musée du Jeu de Paume, in Paris, in 1997, and then toured for several years, another held at the Centro Cultural del Conde Duque in Madrid in 1998, and a large-scale travelling exhibition entitled Visión en movimiento that was shown at the Museo Tamayo, in Mexico, the Fundación Proa, in Argentina, and the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, in Bergamo, Italy, in 2005.

In 2015 works by Soto were also exhibited at the Galerie Perrotin in Paris and New York & at the Musée Soulages in the city of Rodez in the south of France.  In 2019 his works were exhibited at the Hauser & Wirth Gallery in New York and at the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain.

By the time Soto died in Paris in 2005, he had received numerous distinctions, including the Venezuelan National Plastic Arts Award in 1984 & the French Grand Prix National de Sculpture in 1995.

Soto. “Doble progresión azul y negra”, 1975
300 x 300 x 300 cm
“Chronochrome” exhibition, Perrotin Gallery, Paris, France, 2015. Photo © Pierre Antoine. Courtesy Perrotin Gallery