The Illusive Eye

El Museo del Barrio presents The Illusive Eye, an international survey on Kinetic and Op art. The exhibition offers a broad intellectual context for Op art and geometric abstraction, one that goes against the grain of formalist art history. The selection provides a special focus on artwork from the Americas and features major artists from seventeen countries in Latin America and beyond.

“The Illusive Eye is about illusions—those we see and feel when we look at Op and kinetic art and those experienced by the curators and art historians of these movements,” said Jorge Daniel Veneciano, Executive Director, El Museo and exhibition curator. “The perceptual play of things seen and unseen provides us with a model for understanding the relative invisibility of Latin American artists in past surveys of Op art.”

The Illusive Eye puts forth a reading of Op art and geometric abstraction that is notably different from that of prior exhibitions, which focused on the psychology and physiology of perception. El Museo’s exhibition traces the concepts and values of optical art to its esoteric origins in Pythagorean (Egyptian) and Theosophical (Eastern) mysticism. The Illusive Eye places Op art in a truly international context, beyond that of the narrow European model of modernism as perpetuated by Western museums.