Regina Aprijaskis (Bordeaux, 1919 - Lima, 2013) began her training in the arts under the tutelage of Camilo Blas at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in Lima, Peru, where she learned techniques of realism and figuration and painted Andean scenes, nudes and still lifes. Her formative trips to New York City in the 1950s and ‘60s introduced her to abstract expressionist painting and allowed her to study with Theodoras Stamos at the Art Students League. Aprijaskis had her first solo exhibition at the Instituto de Arte Contemporáneo in Lima in 1968, which featured her first works of geometric abstraction. However, when the military dictatorship was instated that same year, Aprijaskis stopped painting in order to work with her husband in a factory and would not return to painting for another 27 years. In 1995 Aprijaskis’ work was presented at the Sala Luis Miró Quesada Garland in the Centro Cultural in Miraflores, her first exhibition following her hiatus. She would continue making and exhibiting work until her death. Her work has been exhibited in individual and collective shows internationally and acquired by both public and private collections.

In 1968, Aprijaskis had her first-ever individual exhibition at the Instituto de Arte Contemporáneo de Lima (IAC), and displayed among her works a selection of abstractions from her formative series Paracas (1967). In his review, critic Juan Acha—widely regarded for his writings in the daily newspapers on the intersections of Peruvian identity and nationalism, and who later coined the important term on experimental art practices or non-object-based art called “no-objetualismo”—highlighted the importance of Aprijaskis stripping away of romanticism or subjective expressionism in favor of a dynamic structural surface and perceptual logic.[1] Acha draws attention to her successful arrival at abstraction from an early academic training at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in Lima, then under the direction of José Sabogal, the renowned master of indigenismo. In the early 1940s, Aprijaskis produced examples of costumbrismo, folkloric studies of Andean Indian themes, still lifes or bodegones, and female nudes in the manner of her teachers Camilo Bias and Julia Codesido. Paracas (originally executed as watercolors on modest cardboard) captures in opulent colors and constructive lines the shifting coastal light, horizons, and atmosphere of this ancient seaside site; the following series Green Port and Espacio, larger acrylics on canvas (1967-1970), turn sharply to a volumetric expression of space, apparent in Untitled (1970). In 1964, four years prior to Aprijaskis’ solo exhibition, the influential touring exhibition Josef Albers: Homage to the Square (organized by The Museum of Modern Art’s International Council) arrived in Lima at the IAC. Through Albers use of color as visual memory, we may consider Aprijaskis attention to elemental form as one that oscillates between the physical and the psychological.

 

After the Second World War, the cultivation of modernist strategies in an industrializing Peru was collectively debated and declared by artists, writers, and architects, in such associations as Espacio (Space), which included painter Fernando de Szyszlo and architect Luis Miró Quesada Garland; the founding of Galeria de Lima; and the later inauguration in 1958 of the l Salón de Arte Abstracto at the Museo de Arte de Lima. However, like many Latin American artists who traveled abroad in the 1950s, Aprijaskis was increasingly oriented to the New York scene, with successive visits to museum and gallery exhibitions. Between 1965-68, she intermittently studied figure drawing and painting with the Abstract Expressionist painter Theodoros Stamos at the Art Students League, long a historical nexus in New York for artists from the US and Latin America. Under Stamos her drawings render the foreshortened female nude embedded in dense gestural brushwork. (For the series above, Greenport, Long Island, recalls the old fishing village and summer community to a coterie of artists associated with the New York School.) Accordingly, in her pictorial reconciliation of figuration and abstraction, Aprijaskis duly mediates the plane’s structural and corporeal relationships, unfolding space chromatically yet controlling surface tension through repetitive, framed edges.

 

Recognized as a counterpoint to Peru’s figurative tendencies in the 1960s and ‘70s, Aprijaskis’ paintings are frequently aligned to the label Hard-edge, or framed alongside the experimental Peruvian collectives Señal (1964) or Arte Nuevo (1965-66). However, her growing legacy offers an expansive interrogation of Peruvian modernism and Latin American identity, one that engages local and transnational encounters in constructivism, concretism, and informalism, as well as her individual position as a woman artist within the cultural politics of Lima.

 

[1] JA [Juan Acha], “Superando expectativas: R. Aprijaskis en el I.A.C.,” El Comercio (Lima, Perú), May 1,1968; see also, N. Nahuaca [Juan Acha], "La peruanización de la pintura,” El Comercio (Lima, Perú), August 31,1958.