NEW YORK, NY.- Sotheby’s presents the May 2016 auction of Latin America: Contemporary Art, the only sale exclusively dedicated to Latin American artists’ contributions to avant-garde movements such as: Constructivism, Geometric Abstraction, Kinetic Art, Concrete – Neo Concrete Art, Conceptual Art and new trends in Contemporary art. The May offering will include outstanding works by artists including Joaquín Torres-García, Jesús Soto, Carlos Cruz-Díez, Gego, Gabriel Orozco and more. Similar to the auction of Latin America: Modern Art — also on 24 May— the sale features a particularly strong selection of works by Brazilian masters such as Almir Mavignier, Alfredo Volpi, Hélio Oiticica, Iberé Camargo, Sergio Camargo, and an important selection of works by Vik Muniz, one of the most celebrated artists of his generation. Select highlights will be on view from 29 April to 9 May, and the full exhibition will open to the public in Sotheby’s York Avenue galleries on 20 May, alongside the full sale of Latin America: Modern Art.

Almir Mavignier, a native Brazilian, was an essential member of the Group ZERO network founded in 1957. He was a young student of Max Bense, Max Bill and Josef Albers at the Hochschule für Gestatung in West Germany; already a leading abstract artist in Brazil, the time spent alongside Bense, Bill and Albers created a seismic shift in Mavignier’s practice and output. Mavignier created his first dot paintings in 1954, and joined the Group ZERO in 1958. Vorn und hinten 7 (para frente e para atrás 7), created in 1968, is completely dominated by carefully drafted and restrained patterns of dots; it exemplifies Mavignier’s concepts of sensation, deformation, formation and movement. Estimated at $150/250,000, Vorn Und Hinten 7 (Para Frente E Para Atrás 7) is the most remarkable work by the artist to ever come to auction.

Joaquín Torres-García’s Constructivo doble línea from 1932 is a consummate example of his early Constructivos (estimate $600/800,000). The present work illustrates the artist’s celebrated iconography, including references to the classical temple, humanity, eternity and time. The lines on the canvas not only construct the scaffolding on which those symbols are inscribed, but also subdivide each into smaller sections so that they are integral to the grid. The result is a vibrantly textured Constructivist surface. Constructivo doble línea is distinguished by being one of the first works Torres-García painted in Madrid, rather than in Paris. After Paris was submerged in the economic crisis started by the 1929 crash in New York, Torres-García had to move out of Paris with his whole family and settled in Madrid in November of that year. Constructivo doble línea comes to auction from the Collection of Patricia Phelps De Cisneros, sold to benefit the Latin American Initiatives of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

A further highlight of the Contemporary Art auction is Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco’s wood sculpture Tronco Verde from 2007 (estimate $200/300,000). The present work expands upon Orozco’s original series of paintings titled the Samurai Tree Invariants, which were inspired by a move in the game of chess. However, in Tronco Verde, Orozco formally appropriates an organic element — a tree trunk — as both support and agent in depicting the elegant structural diagram of circles and quadrants. Orozco is quoted as saying “I love the idea of how trees grow from a center, how they also grow underground, and on the ground, from a center and a horizon, they start to develop all the branches. A tree is a metaphor for me.”