A pioneering visible artist whose 50-year follow balanced exuberant spontaneity with measured precision, Bechara spent most of his life residing and dealing in New York. He was widely known for his fervent assist of traditionally underrepresented artists, lots of whom have been his friends, like Carmen Herrera and Leon Polk Smith, and his advocacy for Latine arts and establishments resembling El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem.
Tony Bechara, “Abstract Composition” (1970-1) (© Tony Bechara, courtesy Lisson Gallery)
Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1942, Bechara initially traveled to Washington, DC, to check legislation at Georgetown College, the place he obtained his Bachelor’s diploma. Unsure about this profession trajectory, Bechara subsequently traveled to Paris, the place he studied on the Sorbonne for a yr whereas turning into immersed within the metropolis’s arts and tradition panorama. It was there that he developed a ardour for portray.
Again in america within the early Nineteen Sixties, Bechara enrolled on the College of Visible Arts in Manhattan, creating a portray approach outlined by a system of managed chaos. By way of experimental automated portray strategies and meticulous premeditated grid-making, he explored the endless prospects of coloration.
Tony Bechara, “Carib” (1973) (courtesy El Museo del Barrio)
Along with his artwork follow, Bechara was an energetic member of New York’s Latine and Latin American arts group, serving on the board of a number of native arts organizations together with the Studio in a College, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and El Museo del Barrio, the place he was board chairman for 15 years. He was named chairman emeritus in 2016 and remained a significant pressure on the museum, donating $1 million in 2018 to the establishment’s endowment to assist its curatorial and education schemes. In a 2015 interview with AzureAzure, Bechara described this cultural patronage as akin to “artistic projects”: “They are an extension of my commitment to art, like unfinished murals in which I work during the night.”
Patrick Charpenel, govt director of El Museo del Barrio, stated Bechara was “a catalytic presence in New York’s art world.”
“His own artistic practice was groundbreaking, and his deep commitment to championing overlooked artists helped expand and diversify the canon of art history,” Charpenel stated in a press release to Hyperallergic.
Tony Bechara, “19 Reds” (2015) (courtesy Parrish Artwork Museum)
All through his lifetime, Bechara’s dynamic compositions have been spotlighted in quite a few solo and group exhibitions, together with Ten Puerto Rican Artists (1970) on the Brooklyn Museum, the 1975 Whitney Biennial, and The Formed Discipline: Eccentric Codecs (1981) at MoMA PS1.
In the present day his work could be discovered within the collections of establishments resembling Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, El Museo del Barrio, the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, and the Parrish Artwork Museum, whose Govt Director Mónica Ramírez-Montagut described Bechara as “a role model of all that can be accomplished in a life.” Earlier this yr, Bechara gifted his portray “19 Reds” (2015) to the museum’s assortment.
“His legacy lives on in the vibrant and pulsating geometry of his paintings,” Ramírez-Montagut advised Hyperallergic, “and in his unwavering commitment to uplifting artists and the creative community.”
