Philippe HIQUILY (1925-2013) is a singular French artist. A sculptor but also a furniture designer, HIQUILY has kept away from the art market and artistic movements. Free, hedonistic, he gives his works a spirit that is both dreamlike and surreal. The almost ubiquitous eroticism and the delicacy of his achievements contrast with the rawness of the recovery materials that serve as his basis.

HIQUILY joined the National Higher School of Fine Arts in Paris in 1953.

In the early 1960s he was spotted by the decorator Henri SAMUEL and quickly became an essential reference in the decoration industry. This lucrative activity allowed him to continue making sculptures.

From the 1980s, heavily influenced by the work of the American artist Alexander CALDER, he explored the question of mobility, balance and movement. By integrating electric motors into his works, he breathes a new dimension into the traditional design of sculpture.

His notoriety grew and his work was sealed in history and everyday life: the artist received public commissions (such as that of a 6-metre-high "Marathonian" for the city of Vitry-sur-Seine in 1981) and his work was represented in famous museums.

Philippe HIQUILY (1925-2013) is a singular French artist. A sculptor but also a furniture designer, HIQUILY has kept away from the art market and artistic movements. Free, hedonistic, he gives his works a spirit that is both dreamlike and surreal. The almost ubiquitous eroticism and the delicacy of his achievements contrast with the rawness of the recovery materials that serve as his basis.

HIQUILY joined the National Higher School of Fine Arts in Paris in 1953.

In the early 1960s he was spotted by the decorator Henri SAMUEL and quickly became an essential reference in the decoration industry. This lucrative activity allowed him to continue making sculptures.

From the 1980s, heavily influenced by the work of the American artist Alexander CALDER, he explored the question of mobility, balance and movement. By integrating electric motors into his works, he breathes a new dimension into the traditional design of sculpture.

His notoriety grew and his work was sealed in history and everyday life: the artist received public commissions (such as that of a 6-metre-high "Marathonian" for the city of Vitry-sur-Seine in 1981) and his work was represented in famous museums.

Ben Abounassif was born in Caracas in 1964 to Lebanese parents. He graduated from Tennessee Tech University in 1987 with a B.A. in Business Management.

Abounassif’s first contact working in the art world was in 2006 when he launched Leiter Gallery in Miami, a short but successful experience as a co-owner working along with Cuban-born, Miami-based artist Sinuhe Vega Leiter, and Venezuelan-born internationalist & journalist, Jesus Rojas Torres.

Abounassif’s innate creativity was highly influenced by working closely with local artists and by visiting their studios and launching of his works exhibitions in N.Y.

In Venezuela, Abounassif’s geometric works on paper are high on demand. His work always receives high bets from collectors during charities and fundraisers for nonprofits.

Ben Abounassif was born in Caracas in 1964 to Lebanese parents. He graduated from Tennessee Tech University in 1987 with a B.A. in Business Management.

Abounassif’s first contact working in the art world was in 2006 when he launched Leiter Gallery in Miami, a short but successful experience as a co-owner working along with Cuban-born, Miami-based artist Sinuhe Vega Leiter, and Venezuelan-born internationalist & journalist, Jesus Rojas Torres.

Abounassif’s innate creativity was highly influenced by working closely with local artists and by visiting their studios and launching of his works exhibitions in N.Y.

In Venezuela, Abounassif’s geometric works on paper are high on demand. His work always receives high bets from collectors during charities and fundraisers for nonprofits.

Ben Abounassif was born in Caracas in 1964 to Lebanese parents. He graduated from Tennessee Tech University in 1987 with a B.A. in Business Management.

Abounassif’s first contact working in the art world was in 2006 when he launched Leiter Gallery in Miami, a short but successful experience as a co-owner working along with Cuban-born, Miami-based artist Sinuhe Vega Leiter, and Venezuelan-born internationalist & journalist, Jesus Rojas Torres.

Abounassif’s innate creativity was highly influenced by working closely with local artists and by visiting their studios and launching of his works exhibitions in N.Y.

In Venezuela, Abounassif’s geometric works on paper are high on demand. His work always receives high bets from collectors during charities and fundraisers for nonprofits.

Ben Abounassif was born in Caracas in 1964 to Lebanese parents. He graduated from Tennessee Tech University in 1987 with a B.A. in Business Management.

Abounassif’s first contact working in the art world was in 2006 when he launched Leiter Gallery in Miami, a short but successful experience as a co-owner working along with Cuban-born, Miami-based artist Sinuhe Vega Leiter, and Venezuelan-born internationalist & journalist, Jesus Rojas Torres.

Abounassif’s innate creativity was highly influenced by working closely with local artists and by visiting their studios and launching of his works exhibitions in N.Y.

In Venezuela, Abounassif’s geometric works on paper are high on demand. His work always receives high bets from collectors during charities and fundraisers for nonprofits.

The Franco-Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez (Caracas, 1923) has lived and worked in Paris since 1960. He is a major protagonist in the field of Kinetic and Optical art, a movement that encourages “an awareness of the instability of reality.”

Carlos Cruz-Diez graduated from the School of Visual Arts and Applied Arts, Caracas, in 1945. While still at art school, he worked as an illustrator for popular Venezuelan newspapers and magazines such as La Esfera, Elite, and El Farol. From 1946 to 1955, he was the creative director at the Caracas branch of McCann-Erickson, the international advertising agency, and contributed illustrations to the Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional.

He first went to Europe in 1955 and lived in El Masnou (Cataluña, Spain), where he began a defining phase in his career, creating his earliest abstract compositions (Parénquimas) and his first Objetos Rítmicos Móviles [Mobile Rhythmic Objects]. He visited Paris that same year, where he saw the Le Mouvement exhibition at the Galerie Denise René. In 1956 he quit producing figurative social protest painting and returned to Venezuela, where he opened the Estudio de Artes Visuales, a visual arts studio for graphic and industrial design. It was during that period that Carlos Cruz-Diez started developing the conceptual platform for his work based on optical and chromatic phenomena, a process that led to the creation of his first Color Aditivo [Additive Color] and Fisicromía 1, in 1959. He and his family settled in Paris in 1960, where he met and discussed his ideas with international artists such as Agam, Tinguely, Soto, Buri, Picelj, Morellet, Camargo, Lygia Clark, Le Parc, Calder, and Vasarely.

Carlos Cruz-Diez articulated his exploration of the phenomenon of color in eight projects:

Couleur Additive [Additive Color], Physichromie, Induction Chromatique [Chromatic Induction], Chromointerférence [Chromo-Interference], Transchromie, Chromosaturation, Chromoscope, and Couleur à l’Espace [Color in Space].

Originally from Egypt, Yves Hayat first developed his aesthetic sensibilities living in a country enriched with history and cultural diversity. Art was his first love. In 1956, after the Egyptian Revolution, Hayat left for France. For five years, he studied Art at the Ecole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs of Nice.

In 1973, Hayat chooses to go into advertising and marketing, which led him to open his own agency. The creative trade captivated Hayat. His experience in the field also enabled him to discover and learn to use new forms of technology, and master his techniques. In the 1990s, equipped with those skills, he decided to return to art, rediscovering the old masters, photographing people, the streets, society products, museum paintings and recuperating magazine and web images, which are carefully classified. Hayat is a perfect example of his time: an open mind on society, its streets, its media, its internet. While running his successful advertising business, he starts to show his artwork in galleries. Soon, his art practice took precedence over his profession, which he ended in 2002.

Although Yves Hayat does not consider himself a painter, photographer, or designer, he is widely known as a “plasticien,” an untranslatable French term that refers to an artist who puts the meaning of his work to the fore and uses all the various media and techniques to express it.

As François Birembaux wrote, Yves Hayat belongs to that category of remarkable artists who have something to say, and who say it with such talent that they stamp their impression on the art of our time. His works, modern and contemporary, are however, the product of a deeply classical culture. Thanks to all the techniques which belong to our time: photography, superimposition of images, etc., he creates an original work rooted in the human cultural heritage but which, through the strength of its subjects, conveys every dimension of our era.

Through a strictly artistic approach, Yves Hayat expresses a philosophical thought, not in complicated words but by speaking to our senses, in a clear, untortured way. He presents the essence of our human condition and of our time, bringing out its distinctive characteristics and its violence (…)

The originality of Yves Hayat’s works lies in the amalgam of artistic perception with images from a communication and information-based society. The titles he gives to his works (Business must go on, Parfum de Révolte, The Icons are Tired, Femmes au bord de la crise de guerre, The Shadow of your smile…) from utterly highjacked advertising slogans, have the effect of giving a meaning to the pollution of our everyday lives. They reveal our identity and display our own brand. Not a celebration of barbarity, but rather the fascination created by human ambivalence (…).

Originally from Egypt, Yves Hayat first developed his aesthetic sensibilities living in a country enriched with history and cultural diversity. Art was his first love. In 1956, after the Egyptian Revolution, Hayat left for France. For five years, he studied Art at the Ecole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs of Nice.

In 1973, Hayat chooses to go into advertising and marketing, which led him to open his own agency. The creative trade captivated Hayat. His experience in the field also enabled him to discover and learn to use new forms of technology, and master his techniques. In the 1990s, equipped with those skills, he decided to return to art, rediscovering the old masters, photographing people, the streets, society products, museum paintings and recuperating magazine and web images, which are carefully classified. Hayat is a perfect example of his time: an open mind on society, its streets, its media, its internet. While running his successful advertising business, he starts to show his artwork in galleries. Soon, his art practice took precedence over his profession, which he ended in 2002.

Although Yves Hayat does not consider himself a painter, photographer, or designer, he is widely known as a “plasticien,” an untranslatable French term that refers to an artist who puts the meaning of his work to the fore and uses all the various media and techniques to express it.

As François Birembaux wrote, Yves Hayat belongs to that category of remarkable artists who have something to say, and who say it with such talent that they stamp their impression on the art of our time. His works, modern and contemporary, are however, the product of a deeply classical culture. Thanks to all the techniques which belong to our time: photography, superimposition of images, etc., he creates an original work rooted in the human cultural heritage but which, through the strength of its subjects, conveys every dimension of our era.

Through a strictly artistic approach, Yves Hayat expresses a philosophical thought, not in complicated words but by speaking to our senses, in a clear, untortured way. He presents the essence of our human condition and of our time, bringing out its distinctive characteristics and its violence (…)

The originality of Yves Hayat’s works lies in the amalgam of artistic perception with images from a communication and information-based society. The titles he gives to his works (Business must go on, Parfum de Révolte, The Icons are Tired, Femmes au bord de la crise de guerre, The Shadow of your smile…) from utterly highjacked advertising slogans, have the effect of giving a meaning to the pollution of our everyday lives. They reveal our identity and display our own brand. Not a celebration of barbarity, but rather the fascination created by human ambivalence (…).

Alois Kronschlaeger is best known for his site-specific installations and sculptures, which demonstrate a preoccupation with environment and light, as well as an interest in exploring time and space via geometry.

Born in 1936 in Valera, Venezuela. He studied at the School of Fine Art in Valencia, Venezuela. He made abstract sculptures from recuperated metal. In the 50s, he studied at the University of Caracas. He entered the university to study literature, but he arranged to have access to the metal workshop at nights and on the weekends. He concentrated on making abstract sculptures that are notably a series of chrome-plated mobile half-spheres that were exposed at Studio Actual in Caracas.

After that, thanks to a scholarship, he moved to France where he chose to study Fine Art at the University of Vincennes. In collaboration with an Italian workman, he created a series of geometric sculptures in Plexiglass that were exhibited in Switzerland in 1972. He also participated in an exhibition at the Venezuelan Embassy in Paris with Cruz-Diez.

He then created the famous mobiles where, by means of an engine system, black and white horizontal and vertical lines are moved on a black background. Then the optical movement replaces the engines at the same time that the black and white gives place to the color.

It is the period of the Prochromatic: colored verticals at the front of which are placed fine iron rods that are supposed to materialize the vanishing points.

The Dynamic Chromatic series is a new decisive step since it fractures the painted space. The work is composed by several geometric pieces (canvas mounted on wooden forms). Most of the time, a central rectangle surrounded by two triangles. A painting that invites the sculpture where the fragmentation and the resulting voids allows the work to be more integrated with the wall that supports it. Moreover, these ruptures integrates and gives rhythm to the optical vibrations at the same time. The last works in his series show an evolution: even if his works are still radically geometric, they tend to show a certain de-materialization, causing the color and vibrations to float.

Pollès is a French sculptor born in Paris in 1945. He is considered the inventor of the “Organic Cubism”.

Fascinated by anatomy, he studied medicine and also attended drawing classes at the Academy Charpentier. In 1966, he discovered sculpture from a friend, the sculptor Enzo Plazota. He affirmed: “overnight, as soon as I discovered form, I felt that I could give up everything for it.” In 1970, he went to Carrara and has lived ever since in Pietrasanta. A few years later, he created his own foundry and almost exclusively uses bronze for his works.

His creations represent a continuity to the tradition of Greek sculpture. They could be considered as a short-circuit between Brancusi's purity, Henry Moore's figurative abstraction and Modigliani's lines and forms. His love for the female figure, for sensuality, complexity, and shape led him to explore the female form.

Since the beginning of his career, Pollès has created a singularly stylized cubist form, which became his signature.

Pollès is a French sculptor born in Paris in 1945. He is considered the inventor of the “Organic Cubism”.

Fascinated by anatomy, he studied medicine and also attended drawing classes at the Academy Charpentier. In 1966, he discovered sculpture from a friend, the sculptor Enzo Plazota. He affirmed: “overnight, as soon as I discovered form, I felt that I could give up everything for it.” In 1970, he went to Carrara and has lived ever since in Pietrasanta. A few years later, he created his own foundry and almost exclusively uses bronze for his works.

His creations represent a continuity to the tradition of Greek sculpture. They could be considered as a short-circuit between Brancusi's purity, Henry Moore's figurative abstraction and Modigliani's lines and forms. His love for the female figure, for sensuality, complexity, and shape led him to explore the female form.

Since the beginning of his career, Pollès has created a singularly stylized cubist form, which became his signature.

Victor Vasarely was a Hungarian-born French Op Art painter. He was best known as the "grandfather" of the Op Art movement of the 1960s. Vasarely was born in 1908 in Pecs, Hungary. He initially studied medicine, but soon abandoned the field to take up painting at the Podolini-Volkmann Academy.

Vasarely experimented with a number of different styles before finding his groove in Op Art. After moving to Paris in 1930, Vasarely became a successful graphic designer, systematically exploring the optical and emotional scope of different graphic techniques. This led to his discovery, in 1947, that geometric forms could evoke a sensory perception conveying new ideas of space, matter and energy. He developed his own geometric form of abstraction, which he varied to create different optical patterns with a kinetic effect. The artist made grids in which he arranged geometric forms and bright colors in such a way that the eye perceives a fluctuating movement. This was a major contribution to the development of Op Art.