Elsa Gramcko

Comprised of only four colors—red, yellow, white, and black—this painting represents Elsa Gramcko’s work during the late 1950s and early 1960s: abstract, with fields of rounded irregular shapes. With its central black form, which dominates the other colors, Gramcko appears to respond to Venezuela’s dependence on crude-oil extraction, an industry that shaped the country’s modernization but also destabilized it. Situated within the history of Venezuelan modern art, the painting is connected to the abstract, non-referential modernist Constructionist and Kinetic  movements preferred by her contemporaries, whereas Gramcko often used abstraction and color to represent political ideas. 

–Conor Moynihan, assistant curator of prints, drawings, and photographs