Ongoing Installation
2022-23 Season
Located on the north lawn of The Baker Museum
This season, the north lawn of The Baker Museum is filled with the large outdoor sculpture Extension and Half Sphere (1991), which was made by the Venezuelan artist Jess Rafael Soto (1923–2005). This sculpture, which is made of acrylic and aluminum, shows how Soto was a pioneer in kinetic art.
Soto started out as a painter of people and places, but his interest in geometry led him quickly to sculpture and abstract art. In 1950, he moved from his home country of Venezuela to Paris, where he showed his work at the forward-thinking Galerie Denise René with artists like Yaacov Agam, Jean Tingueley, Alexander Calder, and Victor Vasarely. Like Soto, these artists were interested in geometry and movement, and they helped start the Op Art and Kinetic Art movements.
While Agam, Calder, and Tingueley worked with weight and balance to make works that move when touched, Soto turned movement into something that can be seen. He made big installations like this one, in which the physicality of sculpture disappears into shifting bands of color. His work uses abstraction with hints of realism to show how we experience the world through our senses. Here, a group of thin, closely spaced rods make a white and yellow semi-spherical shape that looks like the moving surface of a boiled egg or the hazy, wavering light of the sun rising or setting.
https://artisnaples.org/baker-museum/exhibitions/2022-23/jesus-rafael-soto
