Iván Tovar: Le Retour

The exhibition Iván Tovar: Le Retour presents a pair of complementary narratives through the sparkling oeuvre of Iv Caribbean artist whose creative impact is only just beginning to be felt globally.

From the 1960s until his death in 2020, Iván Tovar fashioned an important body of two-and three-dimensional artworks – “machines for longing” rendered luminously in “the colours of dreams” – that synthesise Dominican hues, motifs and inventiveness, together with the stylings of mid-twentieth century European art. The group of paintings and sculptures that enliven Le Retour represents both the artist’s emergence on a global stage, as well as the global possibilities of Surrealism – that most internationalist of European movements.

Much more than a Latin American précis of Surrealism, Iván Tovar’s work articulates global ideas, symbols and visual phenomena anew, fomenting divergent ways of seeing that promote a cultural position that has historically been considered subaltern and exotic but that, in fact, remains privileged.