MoMA Museum of Modern Art

This retrospective exhibition introduces the work of the celebrated Venezuelan artist Armando Reverón (1889–1954) to international audiences. The exhibition is divided into sections of figurative and landscape painting, and also includes the life-sized dolls and many of the imitation practical objects that Reverón and his partner Juanita Ríos created to fill their secluded home in the small Caribbean village of Macuto. Early in his artistic career, Reverón painted coastal landscapes with monochromatic palettes imitative of the bright white light of the seashore. These highly tactile paintings are unique in early modernism, and seem to anticipate later monochromatic abstract art. Later, Reverón began to paint depictions of industrial activity in a nearby port. Reverón's figurative works seem to replicate the perceptual experience of puzzling out forms in shadowy interiors. Surprisingly, the subjects of these figure paintings were, increasingly, not human figures but Reverón's life-sized dolls.