"I returned to painting because I enjoy it and felt I could approach the problems of the 1940s with a different mindset.
Tomás Maldonado
Galería de las Misiones is pleased to present the exhibition Tomás Maldonado, Continuities and slippages in José Ignacio, on display from January 1, 2026, through February 8.
Maldonado (1922-2018) was a central figure in 20th-century art and design, renowned for his work as a painter, industrial designer, and distinguished theorist.
Tomás Maldonado emerged as a central figure of Río de la Plata concrete art, moving rapidly from lyrical abstraction to rigorously geometric, rational compositions. He co-founded the Asociación de Arte Concreto Invención (AACI) in 1945, wrote key manifestos, developed cut-frame and coplanar works, and then returned to the “object-painting” format, using mathematical structures, series, and progressions
In the mid-1950s, his interest shifted from fine arts toward design and theory. At the invitation of Max Bill, he joined the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG) in 1954. He served as its rector between 1964 and 1966, where he championed a curriculum based on scientific and technical rigor. In doing so, he transitioned Germany away from Bauhaus concepts and into a new paradigm suited to post-war challenges, ultimately influencing modern industrial design on a global scale.
Starting in 2000, Tomás Maldonado resumed his pictorial practice with an extensive series of works that recovered, from a contemporary perspective, the formal and conceptual principles that had guided his production between 1944 and 1954, a key period for Río de la Plata concrete art. Rather than a mere repetition of those models, this return involved a revision that activated a dialectic of continuities and slips, recognizing the persistence of his rational conception of art while evidencing its reworking from a new historical and epistemological horizon.
In this late corpus, the image organizes as a system of relationships, where rhythm emerges from the reiteration and variation of formal units, articulated through progressions that structure the visual field. These procedures refer to his youthful interest in studying certain branches of mathematics, such as combinatorial topology or symmetry, which privilege structural relationships and regulate internal balances and tensions in the composition. On the other hand, color treatment is another central axis of these slips because, without abandoning its constructive function, chromaticism acquires greater perceptual autonomy, reinforces compositional dynamics, and accentuates the viewer's visual experience.
Maldonado's late production reaffirms the validity of his modern project and demonstrates that the postulates of concrete art, rather than a closed program, present themselves as an open field for re-elaborations. In this sense, the works gathered in this exhibition propose a current gaze on a visual thought that, far from being exhausted in its historical moment, continues to unfold new possibilities for reading
