Myra Landau's Rhythms

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Even before the outbreak of the Second World War, many artists and architects from Eastern Europe settled in Latin America, and this phenomenon continued during the global post war years. Several artists from these European countries developed a practice with kinetic concerns and perceptual interests. Their production encompassed two or three dimensional works that were  static or assisted by machines, or which achieved the effect of dynamism or movement by different means; pieces produced, mainly, to be exhibited in spaces such as museums and galleries.

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Myra Landau is just one of the many artists born in Eastern Europe that later lived and worked in Mexico during the twentieth century. She produced works that relate to the kinetic art. Her work is endowed with certain concerns that seem to conform to Cuy Brett ' s conception of the kinetic: 'Static works that are radical and dynamic in their formal structures'. Born in Romania, she went into exile in Brazil. In 1960, she moved to Mexico City. Landau became a Mexican citizen and lived in the country until 1994.

 

In Mexico, she produced a coherent series of works comprised of drawings, paintings, and textiles; under her concept of Rhythms, begun in 1965, these works were at once  spontaneous and analytic compositions of lines and colors that played  'on the relationship between a structural model and an aesthetic object'. Rita Eder, a researcher and professor at the Instituto de lnvestigaciones Estéticas at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, has mentioned that in Landau’s works a system of forces  (sustained in the laws of chromatic and luminous rhythms) is altered by the subjective imagination, highlighting, for example, the suggestive nature, fugacity, and concrete values of the colors in each work.

 

Often cited as musical, her work goes beyond this domain and achieves the  status of vibration. Her artistic production, defined by the artist as 'art research', showcases an awareness of energy translated into graphic form. Landau played an active role in the development of non-figurative art in Mexico from the mid-sixties onwards and also participated in multidisciplinary and experimental activities such as the Museo Dinámico  (Dynamic Museum), an avant-garde project devised by the Director of the National Institute of Fine Arts, Miguel Salas Anzures.