Investigates the crisis of the sculptural and painterly object in the concrete, neoconcrete, and constructivist practices of artists in Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela.
"In this innovative, deeply researched, and historically imaginative book, Mónica Amor deftly stakes out the aesthetic, philosophical, and political underpinnings of South American geometric abstraction’s grapplings with the crisis of representation prompted by World War II. Superbly knowledgeable of both European and Latin American contexts, Amor analyzes the diverse developments of the nonobject as a transformative aesthetico-political response to that crisis. As such, her work positions itself on the cutting edge of research on Latin American modernism and on broader discussions of subject-object relations."—Robin Greeley, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Connecticut
"This thoroughly researched book convincingly constructs a theoretical thread around Ferreira Gullar's 1959 ‘Theory of the Nonobject,’ a seminal text from the Rio de Janeiro neoconcrete movement. Amor’s extrapolation applies it beyond the immediate regional context, producing a persuasive historical account that avoids the pitfalls of cartographic or teleology-based narratives."—Michael Asbury, Deputy Director, Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation, University of the Arts, London
"Amor has located a conceptual trope (nonobject) that allows her to trace a theoretical path for interpreting a wide and diverse range of modernist practices in Brazil, Venezuela, and Argentina in their artistic search for transformation and their eventual clashes with ideological public agendas. Her book is a thoughtful attempt to create a comparative model of art history framed by the always thorny relationship between art and the sociopolitical utopias reinvented in the region."—Gabriela Rangel, Director of Visual Arts and Chief Curator, Americas Society
"By illustrating how Latin American artists liberally reworked and even rejected European trends, Amor reverses the colonial discourse that places Latin America always in the position of object."
