NEW YORK, NY.- Galerie Lelong announced global representation of the Estate of Elda Cerrato (1930-2023). Born in Asti, Italy in 1930, Cerrato’s life and art embodied multiple migrations: from Italy to São Paulo, Brazil; Buenos Aires, Argentina to Caracas, Venezuela; and ultimately back to Buenos Aires where she lived, worked, and taught for nearly four decades until her death in 2023. Influencing the development of Cerrato’s highly individual visual language rooted in abstraction and surrealism are the political dynamics and avant-garde movements of these locales, as well as the artist’s personal interests in science and mysticism. Galerie Lelong will present work by Cerrato at Art Basel in Switzerland this June and a solo booth dedicated to Cerrato at the Independent 20th Century this September. In 2026, the gallery will host the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York.

Mary Sabbatino, Vice President and Partner of Galerie Lelong remarked: “The gallery has a long and early engagement with artists of the avant-garde in Latin America. Cerrato’s iconoclastic paintings that speak of beauty and mystery are an important addition to the gallery’s program and we are honored to represent her legacy in cooperation with her son, the artist and filmmaker, Professor Luciano Zubillaga.”

Cerrato’s initial studies were in biochemistry, and science, art and spiritual practice became her lifelong pursuits. These interests are meld in a highly individualistic vocabulary of forms and images that are as grounded in the human unconscious as in the cosmos. Balancing her academic work in philosophy with an intense study of the mystic Gurdjieff’s teachings on the evolution of consciousness, Cerrato’s art and life signified the search for a higher consciousness. Intersecting with avant-garde movements in Argentina and Venezuela, Cerrato was associated with such male-dominated groups as the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAyC), El Techo de la Ballena [The Roof of the Whale] and Grupo Escombros [Rubble Group].

Through the influence of a Gurdjieff study group, Cerrato and her life partner, the composer and musician Luis Zubillaga, moved to Venezuela in the early ’60s. It was there that she made her first abstract biomorphic paintings and in 1963 presented her first solo museum exhibition at the Museo Bellas Artes, Caracas. Upon her return to Argentina in 1964, she developed her “cosmovision” paintings. Subsequent paintings produced in the following three decades related strongly to the harsh political realities of Latin America in the ’60-70s, with her "Maps and Multitudes" works, which pair maps of the Americas with images of ordinary people, among her most well-known.

In the ’80s and ’90s, Cerrato returned to esoteric abstraction, working at an increased scale and with an expanded sociopolitical vision. These paintings can be understood as cartographies or diagrams of the invisible, choreographing ancestral cosmologies, myths, rituals, and memories within layered temporalities. In the last twenty years of her life, Cerrato looked back at her own oeuvre in the “Recapitulation Paintings,” layering symbols and images from her lexicon against abstract fields.

Though not as well known in the United States, Cerrato is widely celebrated in Latin America. In 2019, she received the esteemed Premio Nacional a la Trayectoria Artística [National Award for Artistic Career] from the Argentine government and in 2022 was honored with the Premio Velázquez de Artes Plásticas [Velázquez Award for Visual Arts] by the Ministry of Culture, Spain. The jury for the Velázquez Award noted: "Cerrato speaks of memory on the margins to describe a trajectory illuminated precisely from those edges, her ‘being on the borders’ in relation to, for example, movements or institutions, or dominant artistic trends…It is precisely her ability to decenter and shift axes that allows her to weave different threads into a single fabric: esotericism, politics and the anticipatory capacity of art."

In 2021, the retrospective exhibition El día maravilloso de los pueblos opened at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires. Recently, Cerrato’s work was included in the 35th Bienal de São Paulo (2023), the 14th Shanghai Biennale (2023), the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (2024) and the 3rd Jinan International Biennale (2025). Cerrato's artworks are included in private and institutional collections worldwide, including the Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Argentina; Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Argentina; Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas, Venezuela; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, and the Art Museum of the Americas, Washington, D.C.; among others.