{"id":721620,"date":"2026-06-07T20:17:28","date_gmt":"2026-06-07T20:17:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/721620\/"},"modified":"2026-06-07T20:17:28","modified_gmt":"2026-06-07T20:17:28","slug":"remembering-julio-le-parc-a-pioneer-of-kinetic-art-the-art-newspaper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/721620\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Julio Le Parc, a pioneer of kinetic art – The Art Newspaper"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Argentine-born artist Julio Le Parc<\/a>, a pioneer of kinetic art whose work helped redefine the role of the viewer, died on 30 May at the age of 97 in Paris, where he had lived since the late 1950s. <\/p>\n

Despite his declining health, Le Parc had hoped to travel to London for the opening of Light. Colour. Action<\/a>, a major exhibition at Tate Modern devoted to his work (11 June-3 May 2027). Bringing together more than 60 works, the show spans seven decades of a career dedicated to rethinking the relationships between art, space and audience.<\/p>\n

Le Parc transformed light, colour and movement into more than working materials. For him, these were ways of thinking. He co-founded the Groupe de Recherche d\u2019Art Visuel (Grav) and was one of the first living Latin American artists to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. His work challenged passive contemplation and proposed a more physical, playful and democratic experience of art.<\/p>\n

Born in the province of Mendoza in 1928, Le Parc grew up in a working-class family. His talent for drawing was recognised early on by a schoolteacher, and his mother enrolled him in art classes. \u201cThat\u2019s when I started drawing, and that\u2019s when I realised this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life,\u201d he recalled years later. Le Parc soon became interested in the avant-garde movements then emerging in Buenos Aires, including Concrete Art and Lucio Fontana<\/a>\u2019s Spatialism.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Installation view of Julio Le Parc\u2019s Ensemble of Eleven Surprise Movements (1967) at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, in 2013 Photo: Andr\u00e9 Morin. \u00a9 ADAGP, Paris, and DACS, London<\/p>\n

In 1958, Le Parc received a scholarship from the French government to study in Paris. His arrival in Europe marked the beginning of an exploration he would never abandon: movement, light, colour, perception and active public participation. These ideas would later run through Grav\u2019s 1961 manifesto, Propositions sur le mouvement.<\/p>\n

Together with his colleagues at Grav, Le Parc challenged the dominant artistic tradition, moving away from static painting towards works that change with movement, light and the presence of people. Using mirrors, reflection and mobile elements, he created pieces that altered the space around them and invited spectators to become participants.<\/p>\n

In 1966, Le Parc won the International Grand Prize for Painting at the 33rd Venice Biennale. It was a landmark achievement that established him as a preeminent Latin American artist of his generation. The award surprised the international art world, which had widely seen the American artist Roy Lichtenstein<\/a> as the favourite to win.<\/p>\n

Le Parc never limited his work to a single technique or medium. \u201cIf you have an idea, a proposal, a strong thought, what remains is the reflection it produces,\u201d he said. \u201cThe medium used to create it is irrelevant. And it is no guarantee of quality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Among his most significant exhibitions in Argentina was Julio Le Parc: Un visionario at the Centro Cultural Kirchner in Buenos Aires in 2019. Curated by Gabriela Urtiaga\u2014currently the chief curator at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California\u2014the retrospective brought together more than 160 works created over six decades and attracted half a million visitors, a record for the museum.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Installation view of Julio Le Parc\u2019s Blue Sphere (2013) at the Museum of Art Pudong, Shanghai, in 2022 Photo: \u00a9 Museum of Art Pudong. \u00a9 ADAGP, Paris, and DACS, London<\/p>\n

In 2014, Le Parc became a Knight of the French Legion of Honour. Two years later, he had his first museum retrospective in the US at the P\u00e9rez Art Museum Miami<\/a>. Speaking to The Art Newspaper around the time of that exhibition, he described<\/a> the political and social role he had long assigned to the viewer. <\/p>\n

\u201cIn our manifesto, we wrote that, if there is to be a transformation in contemporary art, the viewer must not be left out of it,\u201d he said. \u201cBecause in that moment\u2014and even now\u2014the viewer didn\u2019t count for anything. The viewer is never taken into account in the evaluation of contemporary art. They don\u2019t have the means of expressing themselves, [unlike] people with money, who can pay and give a monetary value to a painting.\u201d<\/p>\n

That idea will be at the centre of Tate Modern\u2019s new exhibition, curated by Val Ravaglia and Francis Hardy and organised in close collaboration with the artist and his studio. Conceived as a winding, almost labyrinthine journey, the show will revisit the early optical experiments Le Parc developed after his arrival in Paris, his celebrated kinetic works, interactive installations and explorations of colour. The inclusion of Blue Sphere (2013), acquired by Tate in 2024, will connect his later work with the early experiments that established Le Parc as a central figure in international kinetic art.<\/p>\n

The Tate retrospective will now open without him, but it extends one of the central ideas of his life\u2019s work: art only becomes complete when the audience enters into it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Argentine-born artist Julio Le Parc, a pioneer of kinetic art whose work helped redefine the role of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":721621,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[12624,76,354,355,49,48,356,75,260845,260846,11487,13782],"class_list":["post-721620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-argentina","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-julio-le-parc","tag-kinetic-art","tag-obituaries","tag-paris"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=721620"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721620\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/721621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=721620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=721620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=721620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}