ABSTRACT
Venezuelan visual artists gained international acclaim in the 1950s because of their investigations of abstraction and kineticism. The 1960s were a period of transition in which new forms of figuration emerged. From the end of the 1960s to the beginning of the 1980s, there was intense activity in the experimental arena of body art. Performance was influenced by a way of being Venezuelan that is very open to international influence and Western ideas of universality, and by the great national traditions of twentieth century art-that is, abstraction, constructivism, kineticism, on the one hand, and the figurative and organicist tradition on the other. Added to these influences at the end of the 1970s was another twentieth-century tradition, that of conceptual art.
