Fanny Sanín (Colombian, born in 1938), who has lived in New York since 1971, is a central figure in Latin American abstraction. Over several decades she developed a personal language of hard-edged, geometric painting. This exhibition marks the first time that Sanín’s four works will be exhibited together at the museum, offering visitors the opportunity not only to view her painting, Acrylic No. 1, 2005, but also to experience her artistic process through three studies that demonstrate the artist’s play with form, color, and composition. Rendered in acrylic on paper or canvas over long periods of time, Sanín’s studies reveal the deceptive simplicity of the harmonious symmetry that prevails in her large-scale paintings.

In 2015, the artist gave the museum the large abstract painting displayed here in honor of Edward J. Sullivan, Helen Gould Sheppard Professor of Fine Arts at New York University, who spoke in Oberlin in 2014 in conjunction with an exhibition of Latin American art at the museum.

This exhibition was curated by Andrea Gyorody, Ellen Johnson ’33 Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.