Wifredo Arcay. Cuban Structures

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Accompanied by archival materials from the still active Atelier Arcay, the exhibition includes twelve works that document his progression from easel painting, which he abandoned in 1956, to the wood reliefs that facilitated the expansion of his practice into architectural space.

Amidst calls for a renewed public art able to embody “the soul of the multitude...to be the visual signification of human community,” as Vasarely wrote, Arcay ultimately brought his participatory model of screen-printing to bear on mural paintings, integrated into a number of buildings designed by the architect Jean Ginsberg.

Associated with the kinetic and optical artists shown at the Galerie Denise René, for whom he often printed, Arcay struck a distinctive path of his own within abstraction, allowing the process of silkscreening--collaborative, reproductive, multiple--to inform the creative evolution of his painting. In presenting this work anew, The Mayor Gallery’s exhibition illuminates the artist’s multifaceted legacy within the postwar history of geometric abstraction, suggesting new synchronicities between painting and printmaking and, no less, between Paris and Havana