Post by Grubb.
Yesterday the second place we stopped during our rainy day Montevideo museum ramble was the Museo des Visual Artes. From the outside it looked like a modernist mid-school painted in bright primary colors with a modest sculpture garden.
Inside, it had a large collection of Uruguayan painters whose main purpose was to mythologize the gaucho. In that respect it reminded me of the cowboy museum in San Antonio. Instead of Caitlin and Remington they had Juan Manual Blane and Joaquin Torres Garcia. So that was mildly interesting, but the surprise was on the second floor where Bruno Widmann’s work was on exhibit.
Widmann (1930-2017) was an Uruguayan painter whose diminutive figures who look like they’ve been revealed by the peeling back of patchy plaster. The effect of these tiny people poking through an impasto of decay is weird and funny.
Are these people being trapped by the painter or freed by the painter? His answer seems to be in the painting he called “Liberation.”
