Jésus Rafael Soto is widely considered art history’s greatest kinetic artist. Born in Venezuela, Soto studied art in Caracas before relocating to Paris in 1950, which remained his base for the rest of his life. He participated in the 1955 exhibition Le Mouvement at Galerie Denise René, the show that effectively launched kinetic art.

Two years later, by 1957, Soto turned to a more gestural form of abstraction, but by 1965, the artist had returned to his geometric language. During this period, he made linear and kinetic objects in a range of materials, including nylon, steel, Perspex and industrial paint.

Major exhibitions of Soto’s work took place during the period of the present work’s creation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1971); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1974); and Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1979). In each of these exhibitions, Soto turned the gallery space in a large, moving kinetic sculpture using nylon or plastic thread. In these constructed spaces, the experience of the spectator is central to the work’s significance, as it is with Quatrato, which invites the viewer to shift and change positions to view the sculpture, the experience changing with the movement, making the unseen tangible.

These later works often played with the contrast of solid and void, disturbing the separation between reality and illusion as Soto played with our sense of vision and construction, our ability to discern what is there and not there. As the critic Steve Taylor wrote for Elephant Magazine, “Soto relentlessly reworked Modernism, merging light, movement and embodied experience to create previously unseen forms of art.”

The work of Soto can be found in most major museum collections worldwide. In 1969, UNESCO commissioned two murals for their buildings in Paris. He later painted additional murals for the Chacaíto metro station in Caracas and the ceiling of the Teatro Teresa Carreño, both in Caracas. In 1979 the Museo de arte moderno Jesús Soto opened in his birth city of Ciudad Bolívar, and now houses works by Soto alongside some of the international avant-garde artists he admired, including Jean Arp, Kazimir Malevich, and Man Ray.