Luchita Hurtado | Maiquetía | Venezuela | 1920-2020
Luchita Hurtado developed a diverse and sustained artistic practice over the course of more than seven decades. Her work encompassed a wide range of formal and conceptual approaches, including surrealism, biomorphism, figuration, and later, explorations centered on ecology, corporeality, and language. While much of the scholarly and critical attention on her work has focused on her late-career figurative series and her involvement with feminist and environmental discourses, a formative yet underexamined phase in her trajectory lies in her sustained engagement with geometric abstraction, primarily between the 1940s and 1960s.
This period was marked by geographic mobility and intellectual cross-pollination. After emigrating to New York from Venezuela in 1928, Hurtado studied at the Art Students League and later at Washington Irving High School, where she developed her foundational skills. In the subsequent decades, she lived and worked in various cities including Mexico City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Her artistic development unfolded in proximity to a broad transnational network of artists, writers, and thinkers. Her interactions with figures such as Rufino Tamayo, Wolfgang Paalen, Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, and Isamu Noguchi contributed to an environment conducive to experimentation across disciplines and cultural references.
Although she was not formally affiliated with any specific artistic movement, Hurtado maintained close ties with the post-surrealist Dynaton group in San Francisco, which included Paalen, Gordon Onslow Ford, and Lee Mullican. The group’s interest in symbolic abstraction, non-Western cosmologies, and metaphysical systems of knowledge intersected with her own inquiries into perception, consciousness, and the symbolic capacities of form. These exchanges provided a conceptual framework within which her geometric works can be situated.
Hurtado’s engagement with geometric abstraction is characterized by a combination of structural clarity and symbolic resonance. Her compositions from this period often include interlocking forms, symmetrical arrangements, and recurring visual motifs such as circles, triangles, and gridded fields. Rather than emphasizing rationalism or pure formalism, her abstractions appear as diagrammatic spaces—configurations that suggest cosmological, biological, or sensorial systems. The palette she employed during these years ranged from saturated primary colors to more subdued, earthen tones, reflecting both a modernist visual vocabulary and a sensitivity to natural and cultural environments.
These works reveal a sustained investigation into the possibilities of non-representational language. The abstraction in her paintings does not seek detachment from the world but instead proposes alternate modes of engagement with it. The geometric elements are not isolated or decorative; they are integral to her exploration of spatial perception, internal order, and visual rhythm. In certain works, there are affinities with Andean textile structures, Native American symbolism, and early astronomical diagrams. These references are not overt quotations, but rather indications of Hurtado’s broader interest in systems of thought that view human experience as embedded within larger natural and cosmic orders.
Though much of this body of work remained outside the mainstream discourse during her lifetime, it formed a critical foundation for later developments in her practice. In the 1970s, her attention shifted to a more explicit figuration with her now well-known I Am series, in which she depicted the body from a first-person perspective, grounded in daily life yet oriented toward metaphysical reflection. The influence of geometry remained present in the compositional structuring of these later works, particularly in the interplay between figure and ground and the integration of pattern as a spatial and symbolic element.
The geometric phase of Hurtado’s oeuvre reflects a period of intense formal experimentation and conceptual refinement. It connects her early interest in abstraction to later concerns with embodiment, perception, and ecology. It also illustrates the ways in which her work evolved independently of dominant art historical narratives, shaped instead by lived experience, intercultural dialogue, and personal inquiry.
LucitaThis dimension of her practice contributes to a broader understanding of mid-century abstraction as a heterogeneous field, encompassing multiple voices, origins, and trajectories. Hurtado’s geometric abstraction is situated within this expanded field, where form is understood not only as aesthetic solution but also as epistemological structure—one capable of articulating relationships between the self and the universe, matter and energy, pattern and presence.