1. Xul Solar was the adopted name of Oscar Agustin Alejandro Schulz Solari, an Argentine painter, sculptor, writer, and inventor of imaginary languages.
23 Facts About Xul Solar
1. 2.
Xul Solar's father, Elmo Schulz Riga, of Baltic German origin, was born in the Latvian city of Riga, at that time part of Imperial Russia.
3.
Xul Solar was educated in Buenos Aires, first as a musician, then as an architect.
4.
Xul Solar returned to London to meet up with his mother and aunt, with whom he traveled to Paris, Turin, Genoa, and his mother's native Zoagli.
5.
Xul Solar began to exhibit frequently in the galleries of Buenos Aires, notably in a 1926 exhibition of modern painters that included Norah Borges and Emilio Pettoruti.
6.
Xul Solar died at his house in Tigre on 9 April 1963.
7.
Xul Solar's paintings are mainly sculptures, often using striking contrasts and bright colours, typically in relatively small formats.
8.
Xul Solar worked in some extremely unorthodox artistic media, such as modifying pianos, including a version with three rows of keys.
9.
The primitivism of Xul Solar is anterior to the appearance of the Gods.
10.
Xul Solar had a strong interest in astrology; at least as early as 1939 he began to draw astrological charts.
11.
Xul Solar had an interest in Buddhism and believed strongly in reincarnation.
12.
Xul Solar's paintings reflect his religious beliefs, featuring objects such as stairs, roads and the representation of God.
13.
Xul Solar invented two fully elaborated imaginary languages, symbols from which figure in his paintings, and was an exponent of duodecimal mathematics.
14.
Xul Solar invented a "Pan Lingua", which aspired to be a world language linking mathematics, music, astrology and the visual arts, an idea reminiscent of Hermann Hesse's "glass bead game".
15.
Xul Solar provides his viewer with a new image of an afterlife.
16.
That Xul Solar uses a fetus instead of an image of a deceased person of typical age leads one to read the image as a depiction of reincarnation, representing a break from traditional Catholic ideas of life and death, and demonstrating the investigation into disparate spiritualities which would continue for the rest of Xul Solar's life.
17.
Rather than painting subjects recognizable as Argentine, Xul Solar's focus is internal, painting from his own imagination.
18.
Xul Solar tells his viewer that while spiritual pursuit can be arduous, others have established a path, and they point the way.
19.
From 1943 and 1944, Xul Solar's painting was influenced by his thoughts on the Second World War.
20.
Gradowczyk posits that "Xul Solar reached his highest point of artistic expressivity in these ascetic paintings whose theme corresponded to that anguishing reality".
21.
In 1939, Xul Solar initiated a project to establish a "universal club," which he called "Pan Klub" in Neocriollo.
22.
Xul Solar's purpose was to create a type of salon for intellectuals and those of mutual interests, and inaugurated the club at his home.
23.
The museum exhibits works that Xul Solar selected for the Pan Klub, as well as houses objects, sculptures, and the documents compiling his personal archive.