MANUEL MÉRIDA
Manuel Mérida, a Venezuelan artist born in 1939, settled in Paris in the 1980s after studying at the School of Fine Arts in Valencia, Venezuela. A leading figure of Venezuelan Informalism and gestural abstraction, he worked in Carlos Cruz-Diez's studio while simultaneously pursuing a career as a set designer, film decorator, and creative director for prestigious maisons including Dior, Chanel, Cartier, and Guerlain.
Recognized as one of the foremost representatives of the second generation of South American kinetic art, Mérida creates works in constant transformation. His movable compositions, made from pigments, sand, charcoal powder, wood particles, or painted metal, evolve through the manual or mechanical rotation of their elements. Each movement generates a new monochrome composition, endlessly renewed through the interplay of chance and material.
His work has been exhibited at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas, the EDF Foundation, the Vasarely Foundation, the MACLA Museum in Buenos Aires, the Villa Datris Foundation, Christie's, as well as in Hermès window displays around the world. His works are now part of major public and private collections, including those of Louis Vuitton, Hermès, the MACLA Museum in Buenos Aires, the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas, the Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery in Austin, and renowned institutions such as Cheval Blanc and the Ritz Paris. Recipient of fourteen international awards, Manuel Mérida is represented today in numerous public and private collections worldwide.
"My encounters with artists such as Soto, Cruz-Diez, Camargo, Le Parc, Lygia Clark, and others created an inner conflict that challenged my previous work. Yet I realized that this situation opened the way to a new vision, a new experience... It is worth noting, however, that my working method is closer to that of a gestural painter than to that of a constructivist kinetic artist."
— Manuel Mérida
