Although not well known outside Spain, Basque sculptor Jorge Oteiza is highly regarded in his native country. The Guggenheim Bilbao, perhaps paying a debt to the region, is mounting a retrospective of the late artist’s work. The show positions Oteiza’s sculptures, drawings, and collages, mainly from the ’50s, as precursors to Minimalism, particularly the cubic structures through which he created spatial “desocupaciones” (his term). While this is a temptation that no art historian dealing with geometric abstraction of the period can resist, the work actually has less to do with the literalness and bluntness of Judd’s boxes than with the sculptural experiments influenced by Malevich and Russian Constructivism that took place in Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela at the time.
