56 - ENRICO ARMAS (Caracas, 1957).

ENRICO ARMAS (Caracas, 1957). “To Love You,” 2016. Acrylic on canvas. No stretcher frame. Signed in the lower right corner. Signed, dated, and titled on the reverse. Measurements: 80 x 140 cm. The horse is one of the recurring motifs in the career of Enrico Armas, a Venezuelan artist who has developed a visual art practice centered on the animal figure and its expressive possibilities. His interest in this motif is evident in both his sculptural and painterly work, which he approaches through a personal interpretation in which anatomy is simplified and transformed through geometry, color, and gesture. A painter and sculptor, the son of writer Alfredo Armas Alfonzo—winner of the 1969 National Prize for Literature—and enamel artist Aída Armas, Enrico Armas began exhibiting his work in his hometown, Caracas, at the young age of 16. In 1978, he received a scholarship from the French government to study sculpture and printmaking at the School of Decorative Arts in Nice, as well as at the School of Fine Arts in Paris. He continued his career in Venezuela, furthering his studies at Cegra and holding his first exhibition at the Arte Hoy Gallery in Caracas in 1992. He has dedicated part of his body of work to creating large-scale sculptures exhibited in public spaces, such as his “Monumento al Hierro,” with which he won the Fundametal competition for a monumental piece (Valencia, Carabobo State, 1983). Armas has had more than 70 solo exhibitions and 200 group exhibitions, and his work is represented at the Museum of Culture, the National Art Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, and the Arturo Michelena Museum in Caracas, among many others.