Paris, Feb 27 (IANS/EFE): The Pompidou Centre in Paris is showcasing the work of Venezuelan artist Jesus Rafael Soto, whose style was dominated by the use of movement, geometry and colour.

The show features 20 works dated between 1955 and 2004, a year before the artist's death.

The exhibition was made possible by the decision by Soto's descendants to donate the 20 emblematic works to the French state in 2011 in lieu of tax payments.

The "donation offers an opportunity to apprehend all the meticulousness and subtlety of a work which has been persistently built up in a dialogue with the founding fathers of abstract art - Mondrian, Malevitch and Moholy-Nagy - and with the artist's contemporaries, Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely foremost among them", the museum said in a statement posted on its web site.

Soto and the other kinetic artists "wanted the works of art, the paintings and the sculptures, to not just be static objects, but to turn them into objects that appeared to be in motion", exhibition curator Jean-Paul Ameline told EFE.

Jesus Rafael Soto was born into a poor family in Ciudad Bolivar, Venezuela, in 1923 and arrived in Paris with a group of Venezuelan and Latin American friends in 1950 to study modern art.

Soto gained international fame in the 1960s with exhibitions in London, Berne, Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris.

Even though the kinetic movement fell out of favour in the 1970s, Soto's work remains relevant today.

"The movement is part of life and being part of life, it is also part of art," Ameline said.

The exhibition at the Pompidou Centre, one of the world's leading modern art museums, opens on Wednesday and runs until May 20.