Provenance: Private Collection, USA

ABOUT THE WORK

People as depicted by Arturo Luz are elegant, expressionless and utterly refined; corporeal but vague, stately but understated. The picture is structured to emphasize straight lines and circular shapes. The stilt-like legs and arms have no equivalents in real life. Luz does not subdue the color element to highlight the straight lines and circles. The severely reductivist ethos indicates the direction in which Luz was headed as early as the first half of the 1960s. This artwork is one of utter simplicity that belies careful precise planning. The head faceless and pin shaped, is reduced to its basic geometric component. The human figures are abstracted as well as drastically reduced like Bauhaus stage characters. The influence of Kuniyoshi is seen in the geometric reduction of bodies. The human body though is not emphasized as much — it just becomes a geometric statement.