Curator, Smooth Nzewi: My name is Smooth Nzewi. I'm the Steven and Lisa Tanabaum Curator in the Painting & Sculpture Department. So what we're doing with this gallery is focusing on hard-edged abstraction from the 1960s through the '70s. The story actually begins with New York as the center. But as we know, artists were constantly moving from one place to the other, and so the style transformed as it went international.
Narrator: Colombian painter Fanny Sanín was one of the artists who participated in such exchange. She remembers seeing an exhibition in 1968 with paintings by some of the artists in this gallery, including Ellsworth Kelly and Kenneth Noland.
Artist, Fanny Sanín: The size of the colors and everything was very new to me. I was very impressed , so I decided to follow the same language [as] those artists.
Narrator: Starting in the 1970s, Sanín started making geometric paintings like this one, which required a new type of paint.
Fanny Sanín: I felt that the oil wasn't very good for me to work in that kind of painting. Because oil dries very slow and gives so much shine, and left the brushstrokes. That's when I changed to acrylic. It dries fast, and also the color is more plain and flat.
Narrator: For Sanín, this change also allowed her to explore color in new ways.
Fanny Sanín: The color is not only one later. I never apply a color straight from the tube. It's only mixture, and the color gradually become[s] the color that I wanted. I mean, it grows. And then I sit there, and I look at the painting and see how it's related to the other colors. And it's a lot of meditation too. It has to have spirituality in it. It is the result of my life, my personality, the places that I have visited. Everything is there, I think.