Alejandro Otero

Alejandro Otero
A sculpture by Alejandro Otero at Jesús Soto Museum of Modern Art
Born	March 7, 1921 El Manteco, Bolívar
Died	August 13, 1990 Caracas
Nationality	Venezuelan
Known for	geometric abstract painter, sculptor, writer, cultural promoter
Movement	Op Art, Geometric abstraction
Awards	1940: first prize in the First Venezuelan Official Art Salon / 1958: Otero was awarded the National Prize for Painting in the Official Salon / 1959:represented Venezuela in the Biennale of São Paulo, receiving an honourable mention Spouse(s)= Mercedes Pardo born July 20,1921 Died March 24,2005

Alejandro Otero (El Manteco, Bolívar March 7, 1921 - Caracas 13th, August 1990) was a Venezuelan painter of Geometric abstraction, a sculptor, a writer and a cultural promoter. He was a founding member of the Los Disidentes () group.

1940: first prize in the First Venezuelan Official Art Salon / 1958: Otero was awarded the National Prize for Painting in the Official Salon / 1959:represented Venezuela in the Biennale of São Paulo, receiving an honourable mention

Alejandro Otero studied art at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Artes Aplicadas de Caracas from 1939 to 1945. In 1940 he won a prize in the First Venezuelan Official Art Salon. After his studies, Otero traveled to New York and Paris where he focused his work on a revision of Cubism in 1945, living in Paris until 1952. In 1945 he also went to Washington, D.C., where he exhibited figurative works at the Pan American Union.He was married to Venezuelan artist Mercedes Pardo in London, 1951. Descendants: Mercedes Otero Pardo, Carolina Otero Pardo, Alejandro Otero Pardo and Gil Otero Pardo

He produced some of his most important pictorial series in Paris, including Las Cafeteras (The Coffee Pots), painted between 1946 and 1948, which marks his transition from representation to abstraction. Shown at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas in 1949, these paintings caused a critical uproar in culturally conservative Venezuela, which ultimately, helped trigger the emergence of modernist abstraction in Venezuela. This works became well known in 1948 at an exhibition in Washington, D.C. since they served as a transition for Otero to overcome Realism and start a new era for Venezuelan painting.

In 1950, Otero traveled in the Netherlands, seeking out the work of Piet Mondrian, an artist who became pivotal for the development of Otero's new series of works, including Líneas de color sobre fondo blanco (Colored Lines on a White Background) of 1951 and Collages ortogonales (Orthogonal Collages) of 1951–52. These latter works, dynamic collages that featured a tight weave of horizontal and vertical bands of multihued paper, show the artist experimenting with the spatial and optical effects of line and color. The idea of the module in Otero's practice first emerged in these works, in which he exhaustively explored a dynamic conception of space and pictorial structure typical of Op Art and Kinetic Art.