IVAN TOVAR.
Edición Limitada. Realizada para portada del libro “Fantasma de una Lejana Fantasía” 1995.
MEDIUM: Screenprinting on paper.
DIMENSIONES: 7½”×5¾ inches
DETAILS: Signed in pencil and dated on the lower right and left side of the paper by the artist Ivan Tovar.
PROVENANCE: Acquired from the publishing company, by the gallery and sold to a private collector, acquired by the present owner. Courtesy of a private collection.
ABOUT IVAN TOVA
The late Dominican Artist Ivan Tovar (B. 1942-2019) practiced his studies in the National School of Fine Arts and graduated in 1959, receiving his first painting award. In 1963, he received an education credit to continue his studies in Paris. This placed Tovar in the center of what was the surrealist French movement, immediately immersing himself in the surrealist circles of the city, in which he lived for 20 years. Arriving back in the Dominican Republic he became one of the most established artists of his time and of the Latin America Dominican Republic. During his later years of his career he received the most important distinction that an artist can receive in the Dominican Republic by the Ministry of Culture: “Nacional Visual Arts Awards 2028”. He passed away on the 13th of April of 2020 in the city of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
With surrealist creation as a focus in his career, his works reinvented what was known as the surrealism movement in the Dominican Republic, it disturbed it and transformed the vision of the Dominican viewer. In a sense, he conserved still life, the landscape and even portrait, pillars of the old academy, but he completely changed its identity, in his own way, how he felt it, how he dreamt it, how he explored it. Objects and subjects, themes and anathemas, unknown, disturbing, hypnotic, brought us to the aesthetic climax, during more than half a century, the pleasure of the unknown, reaching the fourth dimension that André Breton required, co-founder, leader, and principal theorist of surrealism.
The Tovarian seduction -“La seducción “tovariana” conjugates a beautiful smooth matter, dreamlike, with supernatural colors in tonal subtlety and light saturation, dotted at the same time of a fickle lightness and a unique density in Dominican art. At the same time, lines and contours that exalt the rigor of design and the purity of a drawing that the painter placed as supreme value.
The Ivan Tovar pieces included in this exhibit are a selection of three Editions showcasing the highlights of his linear surrealistic works.
