Acrylic No. 1, 2005

Fanny Sanín, who has lived in New York since 1971, is a central figure in Latin American abstraction, having developed over several decades a personal language of hard-edged abstract painting that puts her work in conversation with that of Carmen Herrera, Mira Schendel, and others. Sanín’s earliest work had a gestural, expressionist quality, but she turned to geometric forms in the 1970s and began using only acrylic paint, a decision that enabled her to create flat, undifferentiated fields of color like those seen here. (Many of her works are titled after her material of choice.) Sanín creates a sense of depth in her paintings through overlapping forms and variations in color brightness and saturation, generating the optical effect of certain shapes advancing or receding into space. The final product is deceptively simple.