Female-identifying artists everywhere face countless challenges in and out of the art world. MIA Collection’s mission has been to increase the visibility of female artists everywhere. Based both in Dubai and New York and collecting internationally, our founder, Alejandra Castro Rioseco, has made it our defining characteristic to exclusively collect and promote female artists.
For our team and for people everywhere, COVID-19 has drastically changed the professional and personal landscape. To adapt to this situation, we have launched a new initiative which has brought our collection online. As a team, we decided to launch an online museum, MIA Anywhere, where we showcase works from both our permanent collection as well as by visiting artists. After only three weeks running, we have featured the work of female artists from Iran to Chile, Brazil to Spain.
We are delighted to announce that this upcoming week we will be hosting the first retrospective exhibition, and first virtual exhibition, of the late Argentinian artist, Martha Boto (1925-2004). We will be featuring an exciting number of never previously exhibited works by the artist. Boto has been a central figure in our permanent collection and we are immensely excited to share this first retrospective exhibition with the public.
Martha Boto’s work resides in collections internationally, from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in Israel. Her work has also been exhibited in several museums across the globe, from Centre Pompidou in Paris to Museo del Barrio in New York City.
Abstraction and geometry are at the core of Boto’s work. She was a key member of the kinetic art movement both in the Latin American and in the global context, participating in exhibitions and pushing the boundaries of geometry and abstraction everywhere. Her work and research focused on the optical variations of light and color, often juxtaposing static and mobile reliefs. Working with different mediums and materials, she has pioneered the ways in which we experience light physically and intellectually. Inspired by her personal fascination with the cosmos, Boto brought a futuristic vision to her art, constantly experimenting to test the relationships between light, movement, space, time and color.
“I have always been fascinated by the laws of harmony and equilibrium which govern the cosmos through interrelations of light and movement, space, time, and color”
MARTHA BOTO
Boto’s work influenced not only the visual arts but science, literature and technology, as well. Her work, often described as science fiction, furthered the notion that all of these fields could intersect. Boto’s career began in Argentina, where she joined the country’s first abstract art movements and worked mostly on painting. She later founded the research and art collective Artistas No Figurativos de la Argentina in 1957 and shortly after she moved to Paris and took part in the first Biennale of Paris in 1960. Upon her arrival in Paris she began experimenting heavily with kinetics, adding motors and lights to her sculptural practice, resulting on her first Kinetic Light Boxes. In the 1970’s, however, Boto returned to painting. Throughout her life, her art always pushed boundaries and tested the intersections of different fields as she allowed her creativity lead the way.
It is fitting to host Martha Boto’s first retrospective exhibition online as her work existed at the intersection of technology, science and art. We are both humbled and excited to bring this exhibition to the public this Monday, April 26, 2020. We hope that our efforts to bring together the public and the entire artistic community bring meaning and solace in times of such heavy uncertainty.
Cristalina Parra
MIA Art Collection Team