Jesús Rafael Soto

Extension and Half Sphere

Rendering of The Baker Museum North Lawn featuring Jesús Rafael Soto (Venezuelan, 1923-2005). Extension and Half Sphere, 1991. Acrylic and aluminum, 112 1/4 x 303 1/4 x 256 in. Courtesy Ascaso Gallery, Miami. © Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

September 6, 2022 – June 20, 2023
Located on the north lawn of The Baker Museum

The monumental outdoor sculpture Extension and Half Sphere (1991) by Venezuelan artist Jesús Rafael Soto (1923-2005) activates the north lawn of The Baker Museum this season. Composed of acrylic and aluminum, this sculpture exemplifies Soto’s pioneering contributions to kinetic art.

Soto began his career as a figurative painter, but a fascination with geometry rapidly led him toward three-dimensional sculpture and abstraction. In 1950, he left his native Venezuela for Paris, where he exhibited at the progressive Galerie Denise René, alongside artists such as Yaacov Agam, Jean Tingueley, Alexander Calder and Victor Vasarely. These artists shared Soto’s interest in geometry and motion, and together became pioneering figures in the Op Art and Kinetic Art movements.

While Agam, Calder and Tingueley explored weight and balance to make works that move in response to physical touch, Soto reduced motion to visible vibration. He created large-scale installations such as this one, which dissolve the physicality of sculpture into shifting bands of color. His work uses abstraction, with hints of figuration, to suggest our experience of sensory perception. Here, a series of thin, closely spaced rods create a white-and-yellow semi-spherical form, evoking the wiggling surface of a boiled egg—or the hazy, wavering light of a rising or setting sun.

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