Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar’s oil paintings can be treated as precursors to his better-known volumetric reliefs and sculptures. Spending a significant amount of time in Paris in the early to mid-1950s, he soon abandoned the portraiture and expressionist style of his formative years in Colombia to assimilate a new postwar visual vocabulary of abstraction and geometry.

Influenced by concepts advanced by Jean Dewasne and neoplasticism at the Atelier d’Art Abstrait, and with a background in architecture and fine arts, Ramírez Villamizar became concerned with the relation of interlocking and superimposing planes in the pictorial space. With a high sense of order, Mechanical Composition reflects the artist’s distinctive mid-century geometr...