Wanda Pimentel @ Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, Rio de Janeiro - Path in black and white / Percurso em preto e branco

Wanda Pimentel 

Path in black and white  

Percurso em preto e branco

Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, Rio de Janeiro

August 16 — October 25, 2025

Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel presents Wanda Pimentel – Percurso em preto e branco [Path in black and white], at Carpintaria, Rio de Janeiro, marking the first exhibition of the artist’s work in her native Rio de Janeiro since her passing in 2019. The show brings together the Animais series, a group of early black-and-white drawings for the first time. Created between 1965 and 1967, this body of work offers rare insight into a formative period of experimentation, marking the emergence of Pimentel’s distinct visual language.

Using anxious, vigorous lines and a restricted palette, Wanda Pimentel drew animals, some identifiable, others invented, whose forms pulse, meander, and buzz among graphic tangles of squiggles and markings. Beetles, kangaroos, armadillos, turtles, bats, giraffes, owls, and monkeys appear, rendered in an inquisitive hand, as if the artist were exploring the textures of fur, feathers, scales, and prints, only to distort their shapes and patterns into the hallucinatory environments of her stylized bestiary.

This earlier facet of Pimentel’s oeuvre reveals a more unbound calligraphic approach, in which the surface of the paper is almost entirely occupied, bristling with visual activity, a sharp contrast to her later geometrically oriented output, which relied on a rigorous spatiality defined by empty space in tandem with hard-edged depictions of objects and limbs. As art historian Vera Beatriz Siqueira proposes in her essay for the exhibition, “In Wanda, animals seem to affirm the graphic basis and central position afforded to the line, defining issues in her oeuvre, while simultaneously heralding the thematic and plastic question of “involvement”, relationships between creatures, objects and their environments, central to her work

The artist’s Untitled (from the Envolvimento series) (1969) was recently included in the MoMA’s permanent collection and was featured in the exhibition Vital Signs: Artists and the Body, organized by Lanka Tattersall in 2024 at the same institution. Wanda Pimentel is currently on view in Pop Brasil: Avant-garde and New Figuration, 1960-70, at Pinacoteca in São Paulo, Brazil.

Artist Wanda Pimentel

Wanda Pimentel (1943–2019), born and based in Rio de Janeiro, developed a distinct artistic practice marked by precise geometric forms and smooth, hard-edge surfaces that blur the lines between abstraction and figuration. Her depictions of domestic interiors and everyday objects in the late 1960s and early 1970s emerged in parallel with Brazil’s military dictatorship. Her work responds to this repressive context, subtly critiquing the isolating effects of authoritarian rule, conservative social values, and fractured national identity. This sense of isolation also reflects the gendered constraints of Brazilian society and the country's peripheral role in global art discourse. Though visually resonant with Pop Art, Pimentel’s use of synthetic aesthetics carries a darker, more ambivalent tone, challenging the easy assimilation of industrial imagery typical of the genre’s Northern iterations. Wanda Pimentel has works in important public collections, such as MoMA – The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; MAC – Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói, Niterói, Brazil; MALBA – Museu Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina; MASP - Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo, Brazil; MAM – Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

FORTES D'ALOIA & GABRIEL

Carpintaria, Rua Jardim Botânico 971, Rio de Janeiro

fdag.com.br

Pop Brazil: Avant-garde and New Figuration, 1960-70 @ Pinacoteca de São Paulo - Brazilian Pop Art Exhibition

Pop Brazil: Avant-garde and New Figuration, 1960-70

Pinacoteca de São Paulo

Through October 5, 2025

Claudio Tozzi 

Astronautas [Astronauts] (1969)

Courtesy of the Pinacoteca de São Paulo

Pietrina Checcacci 

Dinheiro [Money] (detail), 

from the series O povo brasileiro [The Brazilian People] (1967) 

Credit: Jaime Aciolo 

Courtesy of the Pinacoteca de São Paulo

The Pinacoteca de São Paulo presents the exhibition Pop Brazil: Avant-garde and New Figuration, 1960-70, in the Grande Galeria of the Pina Contemporânea building. Featuring 250 works by more than 100 artists the show offers a broad perspective on the art of the period. Curated by Pollyana Quintella and Yuri Quevedo, the exhibition is divided into thematic sections that trace major events of the time, such as the rise of the cultural industry, the breakdown of democracy, and various social transformations. Works by Wanda Pimentel, Romanita Disconzi, Antonio Dias, among many others, are on view.

In a context of industrialization and political upheaval—including the Cold War and Brazil’s civil-military dictatorship—national artistic production responded to the mass culture, driven by television, mainstream media, and advertising, with both irreverence and resistance. From the 1960s onward, a series of international figurative trends entered national artistic debates. Among them was pop art, which originated in the United Kingdom but gained prominence in the United States through celebrated artists like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. While these artists worked on language within a developed, industrialized society marked by mass production, Brazilian artists operated in a context of underdevelopment and inequality, where they had to reckon with the trauma of a society oppressed by military rule.

“The exhibition explores a moment in Brazilian history that still resonates in our daily lives. Looking at this production is key to understand the emergence of contemporary art in Brazil, as well as the foundational issues in many debates we face today. And, through the gathering of these works, we can grasp the collective strength of a generation of artists who worked to denounce, protest, and dream of a new society,” say the curators.

The artists’ interest in the street—driven by a desire to occupy more diverse and less institutionalized spaces—marked a series of events in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Among them was the Happening das Bandeiras [Flag Happening], held in 1968 at General Osório Square in Ipanema, Rio de Janeiro. It brought together artists such as Nelson Leirner, Flávio Motta, Hélio Oiticica, Carmela Gross, and Anna Maria Maiolino. On that occasion, they displayed silkscreened flags in the square, promoting a collective occupation of public space, in pursuit of broader and more democratic access to the visual arts. The set of original flags opens the exhibition in the Grande Galeria.

Subsequent sections present works that reflect Brazil’s emerging cultural industry, showing stars of Brazilian popular music—whose fame grew thanks to television festivals—amid the fever of the space race, which turned astronauts into “pop icons” and broadcast to the world the historical milestone that was the humankind’s landing to the Moon. Prominent names from the period are showcased, like Nelson Leirner with his altar to the “king” Roberto Carlos, in the work Adoração [Adoration] (1966); Claudia Andujar, with a photograph of Chico Buarque taken in 1968; Flávio Império, who portrayed Caetano Veloso in Lua de São Jorge (1976); the popular artist Waldomiro de Deus, with his characteristic rockets; and Claudio Tozzi, with works such as Bob Dylan (1969) and Guevara (1967), in addition to his astronauts that helped define the iconography of Brazilian pop art. 

The restrictions imposed by the civil-military dictatorship were reflected in artistic production through diverse formal, poetic, and political strategies. The exhibition includes caricatures of generals, featured in the works by Humberto Espíndola, Antonio Dias, and Cybele Varela; political prisoners’ drawings from the Alípio Freire Collection, belonging to the Memorial da Resistência; photographic records that Evandro Teixeira made in the emblematic March of the One Hundred Thousand, as well as works that sought to intervene directly in the political context, such as the CocaCola bottles by Cildo Meireles, which make up the work Inserções em circuitos ideológicos [Insertions into Ideological Circuits] (1970), and the Trouxas ensanguentadas [Bloody Bundles] (1969) by Artur Barrio. The theme of crime also permeated the art of the period. Faced with the oppressive state, figures of marginality were evoked as a subversive strategy, challenging morality and laws. Among them, we highlight a crime scene painted by Paulo Pedro Leal in the early 1960s, the film Natureza [Nature] (1973), by Luiz Alphonsus, and the classic work A bela Lindonéia [The Beautiful Lindonéia] (1967), by Rubens Gerchman.

Pop gestures also appropriated the urban imagery through visual codes and signage. This is the case of works such as Marlboro (1976), in which Geraldo de Barros transforms billboard scraps into paintings, and the structured surfaces with acrylic and brass remains by Judith Lauand (Untitled, 1972). In the central area of the gallery, works express the dispute for public space. Arrows, traffic lights, festivities, and collective projects gain centrality in the works. Buum (1966), by Marcello Nitsche, Totém de interpretação [Interpretation Totem] (1969), by Romanita Disconzi, Lateral de ônibus [Side of Bus] (1969), by Raymundo Colares, and the iconic parangolés by Hélio Oiticica, first shown 60 years ago in the Opinião 65 exhibition, held at MAM Rio, can be seen by the public. In the case of Hélio Oiticica, the visitor can literally try on the parangolés, wearing them in the exhibition space. 

The 1960s also served as a stage for a sexual revolution, sparked by historical events such as May 68 in France and the hippie movement in the United States. At the core of the section dedicated to desire and sexuality are works by artists who reflected on the shifting status of sexuality in Brazil, also influenced by mass culture. This is the case of Wanda Pimentel, with her Envolvimento [Involvement] series (1968), Teresinha Soares with A caixa de fazer amor [Lovemaking Box] (1967), and Antonio Dias in Teu corpo [Your Body] (1967), as well as pieces by Maria Auxiliadora, Lygia Pape, and Vilma Pasqualini.

Curators: Pollyana Quintella and Yuri Quevedo

PINACOTECA DE SÃO PAULO

Pina Contemporânea Building | Grande Galeria

Av. Tiradentes, 273, São Paulo 

pinacoteca.org.br

Pop Brazil: Avant-garde and New Figuration, 1960-70

Pinacoteca de São Paulo, May 31 – October 5, 2025

Artist Barrao @ Oscar Niemeyer Museum, Curitiba - "Teia à Toa" Exhibition

Barrão: Teia à Toa

Oscar Niemeyer Museum, Curitiba

July 10 - November 30, 2025

The exhibition "Teia à Toa" presents a selection of Rio de Janeiro artist Barrão's work over the past 20 years. The exhibition is organized by the Oscar Niemeyer Museum (MON).

Curated by Luiza Mello, the exhibition features approximately 70 works in multicolored ceramics, monochromatic resin and bronze sculptures, watercolors, and installations. This is the artist's first solo exhibition in Curitiba.

"By bringing exhibitions like Barrão's to the public, the MON stands out as one of the most important spaces for contemporary art in Brazil," says Luciana Casagrande Pereira, Secretary of State for Culture. For her, Barrão's exhibition invites us to see beauty, meaning, and poetry where previously there was only waste. "It is this transformative power of art that we wish to increasingly foster, bringing the public closer to thought-provoking and meaningful experiences," she notes.

"A designer, painter, sculptor, and multimedia artist, Barrão repurposes everyday objects and scraps, giving them new meaning. Intuitive, he reconfigures broken or damaged utilitarian objects, transforming them into surprising and creative works," explains Juliana Vosnika, CEO of MON.

"The result is almost an allusion to life, to the imponderable that often destroys predictions and leaves us only with the possibility of adaptation," she says. "Barrão instigates by inverting the original meaning of objects with humor, irony, and poetry," comments Juliana Vosnika.

The curator explains that, over more than four decades, Barrão developed a language marked by intuition and transformation through the combination of everyday elements—recognizable objects drawn from our domestic and urban worlds. "In his studio, shelves house pieces of diverse origins—accumulated and organized according to criteria as intuitive as they are enigmatic. From these fragments emerge hybrid sculptures that defy function and style, always imbued with humor and irony," she says.

She explains that the exhibition's title serves as an invitation to stroll through a forest of shapes and colors where everything is connected by invisible threads. "Like spiders weaving their webs in the air, Barrão works by combining preexisting objects and pieces of objects—broken and glued ceramics, objects molded and cast in other materials, pieces of objects arranged in improbable compositions," says Luiza. "Resin, bronze, porcelain: each element carries the memory of what it once was and now presents itself as part of something larger."

Barrão highlights the watercolors in the exhibition, which, despite being two-dimensional, suggest the sculptural. "They have a lot to do with the work I develop, with the search for relationships between objects," he says.

According to the artist, all of his work is constructed from a world that already exists. "These are objects that had other functions and were already here when I arrived, but now they are associated with others and take on new meaning," he summarizes. "They transform."

ARTIST BARRAO

Barrão (Rio de Janeiro, 1959). Lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. He is a illustrator, painter, sculptor, and multimedia artist. Self-taught, he began his artistic career with the Grupo Seis Mãos (Six Hands Group), 1983–1991, formed with Ricardo Basbaum and Alexandre Dacosta. The group developed activities involving video, live painting, musical shows, and performances, and promoted the Painting and Music Improvisation project in streets, public squares, colleges, etc. The three artists' first exhibition took place in 1983 at Circo Voador in Rio de Janeiro. That year, Barrão participated in the exhibitions "Arte na Rua I" and "Pintura! Pintura!" (Painting! Painting!), both in the same city. In 1984, he held his first solo show, "Televisãos" (Televisions), at Galeria Contemporânea, and participated in the group show "Como Vai Você, Geração 80?" (How Are You, Generation 80?), held at the Parque Lage School of Visual Arts – EAV/Parque Lage, in Jardim Botânico, Rio de Janeiro. He received the Brasília Prize for Visual Arts at the Brasília Museum of Art in 1990. He produced the videos "7 Horas de Sono" and "A Geladeira" with Sandra Kogut. He also creates electronic television vignettes, set design, and album covers. In partnership with artist Luiz Zerbini, video and film editor Sérgio Mekler, and music producer Chico Neves, he created the group Chelpa Ferro in 1995, which works with sculpture, technological installations, and electronic music.

MON - MUSEU OSCAR NIEMEYER

OSCAR NIEMEYER MUSEUM

Marechal Hermes Street, 999

Civic Center, Curitiba - Paraná

www.museuoscarniemeyer.org.br

Eva Jospin @ Oscar Niemeyer Museum, Curitiba - "Re-Selvagen" Exhibition Curated by Marcello Dantas

Eva Jospin: Re-Selvagen

Curated by Marcello Dantas

Oscar Niemeyer Museum, Curitiba

Through August 10, 2025

Re-Selvagem by French artist EVA JOSPIN, is held by the Oscar Niemeyer Museum (MON) and is the artist's first show in Brazil. The exhibition is curated by Marcello Dantas.

The exhibition features nine large-scale works, including installations and drawings, as well as two videos. The installations' raw materials are silk embroidery and cardboard, but the artist also uses wood, bronze, fabric, and other materials.

"Eva Jospin at the Oscar Niemeyer Museum reinforces our mission to connect the Paraná public with the most relevant works in global contemporary art," says Luciana Casagrande Pereira, Secretary of State for Culture. "This exhibition also reaffirms Paraná's cultural diplomacy with France, in a particularly significant year marked by the celebrations of the Year of Brazil in France and of France in Brazil."

Juliana Vosnika, director-president of the MON, states that the sensitivity of French artist Eva Jospin is evident in this exhibition. "By addressing nature and time in poetic works of art, she evokes our emotional memories," she says.

Juliana Vosnika comments that the physical encounter with art allows people to recognize themselves and their own history through the works. "In a fast-paced world, the physical space of museums presents a perfect balance to our digital saturation," she highlights. "This is and should always be one of the museum's roles: to awaken deep feelings from our unconscious."

Curator Marcello Dantas explains that Eva Jospin is known for her meticulous work of creating, with her own hands, illusions of an imaginary world—silent architectures and abundant natural spaces, born from the patient and obsessive gesture of restoring a sense of origin to matter.

"For Jospin, the forest is more than a representation of nature. It's a symbolic place, where mystery, the unexpected, and transformation occur," says Marcello Dantas. "As in ancient tales, his forests are territories where we lose ourselves and find ourselves again." In Re-Selvagem, visitors walk along trails of paper and shadow, entering universes of sculpted foliage, experiencing a kind of intimate ritual. The forms evoke forgotten memories, awaken images from the collective unconscious, and provoke silence.

ARTIST EVA JOSPIN

Eva Jospin was born in Paris (1975), where she graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. For the past 15 years, she has been creating meticulous forests and architectural landscapes, exploring them through a variety of media. Drawn in ink or embroidered, sculpted in cardboard or bronze, her works evoke Italian baroque gardens, 18th-century rocaille decorations, and artificial grottoes. She was a resident at the Villa Medici in Rome in 2017 and was elected to the Sculpture section of the Academy of Fine Arts in 2024.

Among her international exhibitions, the following stand out: “Inside”, at the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris (2014); “Sous-Bois”, at the Palazzo dei Diamanti, in Ferrara (2018); “Eva Jospin - Wald(t)räume”, at the Museum Pfalzgalerie, in Kaiserslautern (2019); “Among the Trees”, at Hayward Gallery, London (2020); “Paper Tales”, at the Het Noordbrabants Museum, in Den Bosch (2021); “Galleria”, at the Musée de la Chasse and Nature, in Paris (2021); “Panorama”, at the Fondation Thalie, in Brussels (2023); and “Palazzo”, at the Palais des Papes, in Avignon (2023). In 2024, she presented two new solo exhibitions: “Selva” at the Museo Fortuny in Venice during the 60th Venice Biennale, and “Eva Jospin - Versailles” at the Orangerie of the Château de Versailles. She also created several large-scale installations as part of special commissions, including “Panorama” (2016) in the center of the Louvre's Cour Carrée and “Cénotaphe” (2020) at Montmajour Abbey. She also created a series of embroidered panels for the Dior Haute Couture 2021-2022 show (Chambre de Soie, 2021).

CURATOR MARCELLO DANTAS

Marcello Dantas is a renowned Brazilian curator, artistic director, and producer, recognized for his interdisciplinary approach that integrates art, technology, and immersive sensory experiences. Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1968, Dantas has a diverse academic background: he studied International Relations and Diplomacy in Brasília, Art History and Film Theory in Florence, and graduated in Film and Television from New York University, where he also completed a postgraduate degree in Interactive Telecommunications.  

Throughout his career, Marcello Dantas has been responsible for the design and artistic direction of several museums and pavilions, both in Brazil and abroad. He is also known for curating high-impact exhibitions that attract large audiences and specialized critics. Among them are "Ai Weiwei: Root," by Chinese artist Ai WeiWei, and "Invisible and Unspeakable," by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa, both at the Oscar Niemeyer Museum. 

MON - MUSEU OSCAR NIEMEYER

OSCAR NIEMEYER MUSEUM

Marechal Hermes Street, 999

Civic Center, Curitiba - Paraná, Brazil

www.museuoscarniemeyer.org.br 

Eva Jospin: Re-Selvagen

Oscar Niemeyer Museum, Curitiba, June 5 - August 10, 2025

Jaider Esbell @ Gladstone Gallery, Seoul

Jaider Esbell

Gladstone Gallery, Seoul

April 1 – May 17, 2025

Gladstone presents the first solo exhibition in South Korea of indigenous artist, activist, and curator JAIDER ESBELL (b. 1979, Normandia—d. 2021, São Sebastião, Brazil). Comprising paintings on canvas and works on paper, spanning the artist’s later years, the show highlights his distinctive visual language of vibrant contrasting patterns across saturated black backgrounds. Esbell’s deep connection with nature, rooted in ecological activism and Macuxi cosmology, permeates every aspect of his work—from the use of plant-based dyes to the depiction of myths and environmental elements such as birds, trees, and cacti. Underscored by his belief in the interconnectedness of all living and natural forms, and the presence of mythological beings and spirits within our complex ecosystem, Esbell’s artistic legacy mobilizes narratives of resistances and champions indigenous epistemologies. 

Esbell challenged the boundaries between art and activism in a practice he named “artivism.” As a key figure in Arte Indígena Contemporânea (Contemporary Indigenous Art), he used his platform to advocate for the recognition of indigenous rights and territories and to create spaces that highlight myriad decolonial perspectives that transcend Western art historical traditions. Driven by his activist efforts, this social movement uplifted artistic production by Afro-Brazilian communities, Indigenous peoples, and other historically marginalized populations. As Esbell’s prominence in the art world grew, he became a critical voice and contributed to the larger community through the establishment of a gallery that served as an artistic and intellectual laboratory, prioritizing institutional collaborations, and curating exhibitions that center indigenous art. 

Esbell’s artistic practice weaves together activism and ecology to affirm Indigenous relationships with the land and urge environmental consciousness. This exhibition brings together paintings and works on paper that forefront narratives highlighting the relationship between living and non-living entities in the natural world through the lens of Macuxi cosmology. Esbell asserts indigenous worldviews and aesthetics through depictions of mythological beings and spirits including Makunaimî, the Macuxi creator of all nature. Works such as Os cactos e jardins de Makunaimí 2 (2021) render vibrant gardens created by Makunaimî, while A festa da chegada das chuvas (2020) celebrates the arrival of rain, capturing the dynamic interplay of nature’s rhythmic cycles. Recurring motifs such as serpents, birds, and cosmic elements function as both cultural signifiers and political metaphors, reflecting concerns towards the exploitative process of extractivism in the Amazon region. Forged through the intersectional dialogue between art, ancestry, and ecology, Esbell’s “artivism” stands as an enduring testament to the importance of creating pathways for indigenous expression within contemporary art frameworks.

JAIDER ESBELL (1979-2021)

Jaider Esbell was born in Normandia, Roraima, Brazil, known today as the indigenous territory, Terra Indígena Raposa Serra do Sol. Jaider Esbell was a member of the Macuxi group and a central figure in the indigenous art movement in Brazil through his work as an artist, educator, writer, curator, and activist. The artist’s multidisciplinary practice spanned painting, writing, drawing, installation and performance, engaging his artistic production as a means of ecological and political activism.

Originally trained as a geographer, Jaider Esbell turned fully to art in 2016 after several years of establishing himself as an educator and advocate for indigenous art and social movements through various curatorial projects and founding the Jaider Esbell Contemporary Indigenous Art Gallery in 2013. In 2021, Esbell's work was shown at the 34th Bienal de São Paulo titled Though it’s dark, still I sing. That same year, he participated as both an artist and guest curator of the exhibition, Moquém_Surarî : Contemporary Indigenous Art, at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM São Paulo). In 2022, Jaider Esbell was highlighted prominently in the Arsenal of the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani. The artist’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions including: Gladstone Gallery, New York (2025); Apresentação: Ruku, Millan, São Paulo (2021); Piatai Datai, Galeria Jaider Esbell de Arte Indígena Contemporânea e Sesc Centro, Boa Vista, Brazil (2019); and Transmakunaima: o buraco émais embaixo, Memorial dos Povos Indígenas, Brasília, Brazil (2018). Jaider Esbell has also been included in group exhibitions at notable institutions including: 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR), Rio de Janeiro; Pina Contemporânea, São Paulo; Museu Brasileiro da Escultura e da Ecologia (MuBE), São Paulo; Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA), Buenos Aires; Museo Madre, Naples, Italy; Triennale Milano, Milan, Italy; and Weltmuseum Wien, Vienna, among others. Esbell was the recipient of the 2016 PIPA prize, one of Brazil’s most esteemed contemporary art awards, and the Prêmio Funarte de Criação Literária in 2010. Esbell’s works are held in the institutional collections of the Centre Pompidou, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA), and Pinacoteca do Estado. 

GLADSTONE SEOUL

760, Samseong-ro, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, 06070

www.gladstonegallery.com

The Birth of Modernism in Brazil @ Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern - Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism

Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism

Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

7 September 2024 - 5 January 2025

Djanira da Motta e Silva

Três orixás, 1966

Oil on canvas, 130,4 x 195,5 cm

Collection of the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, 

purchased by the Governo do Estado de São Paulo, 1969

© Instituto Pintora Djanira

Lasar Segall

Mulato II, c. 1924

Oil on canvas, 64,3 x 45,5 cm

Private collection

The 2024 Venice Biennale is linked to Brazil on several levels. The Zentrum Paul Klee is devoting to the country the large-scale exhibition Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism, which is organised in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

As the first curator based in the southern hemisphere, Adriano Pedrosa is curating the 60th International Art Exhibition. Pedrosa is the director of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo. It is from the holdings of this museum that the Zentrum Paul Klee is being loaned several masterpieces for its major autumn exhibition Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism. Six of the artists of whom works are being shown in the exhibition are also represented in the Biennale.

Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism is on display in Bern from 7 September 2024 to 5 January 2025. The exhibition will then travel to the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

Flávio de Carvalho

Ascenção definitiva de Cristo, 1932

Oil on canvas, 75,5 x 62 cm

Collection of the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, 

purchased by the Governo do Estado de São Paulo, 1969

Tarsila do Amaral

Povoação I, 1952

Oil on canvas, 75,5 x 100 cm

Private collection

© Tarsila do Amaral S/A

At the beginning of the 20th century, Brazil was a young nation in search of its own identity. The population was made up of different indigenous groups, former slaves, colonists and migrants from the whole of Europe and Japan. A great variety of cultures met in this context. Art was in a state of upheaval too, and artists were looking for their own modern artistic expressive forms. Their references were the European avant-garde – including Paul Klee – and their own indigenous and Afro-Brazilian cultures.

The exhibition at the Zentrum Paul Klee shows various ways in which Brazilian artists developed their own modern pictorial languages. Alongside works by ten artists it presents an introduction to formative political and economic events as well as milestones in the country’s literature, music, design and architecture.

Exhibited artists: 

Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973)* 

Anita Malfatti (1889–1964)* 

Lasar Segall (1891–1957) 

Alfredo Volpi (1896–1988)* 

Vicente do Rego Monteiro (1899–1970) 

Flávio de Carvalho (1899–1973) 

Candido Portinari (1903–1962)* 

Djanira da Motta e Silva (1914–1979)* 

Rubem Valentim (1922–1991)* 

Geraldo de Barros (1923–1998)

* exhibited at the Venice Biennale

The exhibition is organised by the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Arts, London, where it will be on display from 28 January until 21 April 2025.

Curators: Fabienne Eggelhöfer, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, and Roberta Saraiva Coutinho, São Paulo, with Adrian Lock, Royal Academy of Arts, London

ZENTRUM PAUL KLEE

Monument im Fruchland 3, 3006 Bern

zpk.org

Thiago Martins de Melo @ Galeria Millan, São Paulo - Ouroboros sucuri - Curated by Gunnar B. Kvaran

Thiago Martins de Melo 

Ouroboros sucuri 

Curated by Gunnar B. Kvaran 

Galeria Millan, São Paulo 

October 9 — November 6, 2021 

Galeria Millan presents Ouroboros sucuri, the first solo exhibition by Thiago Martins de Melo (São Luís, MA, 1981) at the gallery. The show, curated by Icelander Gunnar B. Kvaran, gathers 19 unseen paintings and sculptures, delivering a retrospective insight on the artist’s creation, as well as his different expressions throughout time.

Thiago Martins de Melo’s trajectory reveals a project of multiple experiments on the act of storytelling and its possibilities, as it broadens pictorial techniques. These traces of the work can be seen in the exhibit combining stop-motion animation and sculpture pieces to the traditional support. The development of a plot in every piece expands and moves the technique, developing the artist’s intuitive process through references and signs.

The curatorial strategy of Ouroboros sucuri is divided in two parts, where the first centers the serpent’s symbology. Its appearances in cultural and religious narratives throughout history is evoked in different ways in Martins de Melo’s work, such as the work that entitles the exhibition. The image representing the Ouroboros is a serpent that bites its own tale, composing a rounded shape. This remote concept was observed for the first time in Ancient Egypt and implies ideas such as the eternal return, evolution, and reconstruction. In Martins de Melo’s work the sign is revisited as a frame and a protagonist of the scenes - the serpent is as much the narrator as it is narrated, and it’s also a predecessor of the plot.

The second part of the exhibition presents a “constellation of new works”, that according to Kvaran, reflect recent themes and formal solutions in Martins de Melo’s production. In this section, the poetic composition navigates through occultism and spiritualism, Indigenous and Afro-Brazilians cultural elements, as well as current politics subjects and others, all based on Postcolonial theories. Tô the curator, these works “form a complex construction, where the spectator goes through different zones of fiction based on reality. It’s this fusion between religious and spiritual signs and symbols, with social and political references of collective memory that construct this works with singular energy and insert them in the main painting tradition”.

Saturated with meaning, the stories in the images are juxtaposed, producing layers of simultaneous representations, as in Ascensão – Queda – Aliança – Redenção (2021), work in which the title anticipates a narrative sequence that unfolds itself. These images unravel singular references, familiar to the artist’s constructive repertory. Works as Ogum Corisco no útero da terra – para Glauber Rocha e Naná Vasconcelos (2020) and Ogum Xoroquê expulsa os demônios de Caspar Plautius – para Tuíra Kayapó, Sebastião Salgado e Marighella (2019) invite the observer to identify and interpret the references and their assemblages in the plot displayed.

The exhibition includes a brochure with some of the work’s images and the curatorial statement – a substantial and significant conversation between the curator and the artist, product of a long partnership built over the years.

GALERIA MILLAN

Rua Fradique Coutinhou 1360/1416, São Paulo SP

www.galeriamillan.com.br

_______________

Lygia Pape @ Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles - Tupinambá

Lygia Pape: Tupinambá

Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles

24 April - 1 August, 2021 

LYGIA PAPE

Memória Tupinambá, 2000

Red-feathered polystyrene ball with plastic foot

50 cm diameter / 19 5/8 in diameter

© Projeto Lygia Pape

Courtesy Projeto Lygia Pape and Hauser & Wirth

Photograph © 2020 Fredrik Nilsen, All Rights Reserved

LYGIA PAPE

Concerto Tupinambá, 2000

Two red-feathered chairs with guitar

150 cm / 59 1/16 in

© Projeto Lygia Pape

Courtesy Projeto Lygia Pape and Hauser & Wirth

Photograph © 2020 Fredrik Nilsen, All Rights Reserved

A significant Brazilian artist of her generation and a founding member of Brazil’s Neo-Concrete movement, LYGIA PAPE (1927 – 2004) favored the primacy of the viewer’s sensorial experience and its role in everyday life. Examining the artist’s unique reframing of geometry, abstraction and poetry, ‘Tupinambá’ is the first solo exhibition in Los Angeles dedicated to Lygia Pape’s work and is organized with Projeto Lygia Pape and Olivier Renaud-Clément. Central to the show is the Tupinambá series, one of the artist’s final bodies of work, revealing her desire to create more immersive experiences beyond the conventional boundaries of life and art.

Exhibited for the first time in the US, the works on view from the Tupinambá series – distinctive in their use of artificial red feathers – illuminate Lygia Pape’s sense of connection to Brazil’s indigenous populations and certain characteristics of their history. Unfolding across two galleries, the exhibition will feature the monumental spatial work ‘Manto Tupinambá’ (2000), comprising a series of related sculptures entitled ‘Memórias Tupinambá’ and works on paper, as well as an emblematic Ttéia. This exhibition follows the artist’s critically acclaimed retrospective at the Met Breuer, New York, and inclusion in the Hammer Museum’s 2017 exhibition ‘Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960 – 1985.’

Featuring one of the most commanding and rarely seen bodies of work by Lygia Pape, the exhibition introduces her deeply Brazilian Tupinambá series to a North American audience for the first time. Pape devised a wholly original language during her career to investigate the physical and experiential life of the body, and with this series achieves an unprecedented union of the geometric and the figurative within the wider context of her oeuvre. Here, Pape proposes a refreshingly divergent understanding of Brazil’s modernist history, suggesting that the aesthetic prerogatives of the present are firmly rooted in the nation’s indigenous past.

The Tupinambá series thus reflects Pape’s longtime interest in indigenous Brazilian peoples and cultural practices—most notably that of anthropophagy, a ceremonial variant of cannibalism practiced by the Tupinambá people. She describes it as follows: ‘The Tupinambá devoured their prisoners, their enemy, not from hunger as in cannibalism, but to swallow and assimilate the spiritual capacities of the other.’ Anthropophagy thus possesses a dual valence, in one sense it is literal and ritualistic, and in another, cultural and metaphorical.

Illuminated by spotlights in an otherwise darkened room and accompanied by the projection of the artist’s seminal and quasi-manifesto film ‘Catiti-Catiti’ (1974), these sculptures come to life. They embody Pape’s belief that, despite their population’s veritable extinction, ‘the Tupinambá spirit endures in the Brazilian person.’ By employing a host of powerful symbols that evoke the ancient Tupinambá ritual, Pape poetically reimagines and reclaims her nation’s fraught past in these distinctive forms. Defined by a bold use of red plumage—alluding to feather capes originally made with the red feathers of the Guará bird and worn by the Tupinambá when performing their anthropophagic ritual—the works on view are also adorned with cockroaches and protruding body parts, cohering in a totalizing vision of ghostly sensuality. ‘Memória Tupinambá’ (2000) and ‘Trono Tupinambá’ (2000), for example, display a synthesis of these elements, as spheres and thrones adorned with red feathers sport disembodied hands, feet, and breasts, dripping with what appears to be blood rendered with red paint. As an abstract sculptural representation of anthropophagy’s dual nature, ‘Mala Tupinambá’ (2000) hauntingly evokes the diffusion and ingestion of culture: two breasts of a white woman protrude from an open feather-clad suitcase. Here, the uncanny beauty, violence, and objectification of the body are viscerally felt by the viewer.

‘Manto Tupinambá’ (2000) serves as a sort of apex of the series and, by extension, the exhibition, dwarfing the viewer in its profound impact and effect of surprise. A large square piece of sailcloth hangs just above the floor, supported and pulled taught by metal poles positioned around its edges. Countless red feather spheres rest atop it, some harboring cockroaches just below the feathers, while others feature protruding bones: specs of white in a sea of red. The artist has further suggested that the cockroaches, resilient insects capable of living in difficult environments, featured in the remarkable work ‘Caixa das Baratas’ (1967), symbolize indigenous peoples—extinguished and yet somehow eternally present within Brazilian art and culture—and that the sailcloth refers to the arrival of the European, who, one could say, ‘devoured,’ via eradication, and was ‘devoured’ by the Tupinambá. Pape described her conception of this work, saying ‘I wanted to make my ‘Manto Tupinambá’ an extremely beautiful thing, like original Tupinambá feather art, and at the same time seize the terror of death. Because both are present all the time.’

Punctuating the exhibition is a selection of Lygia Pape’s ‘Desenhos’ (Drawings) from the 1980s, which serve to anchor her later work in the historic lineage of Neo-Concretism and highlight her artistic trajectory toward an increasingly political and environmentally-minded practice, exemplified by the Tupinambá series. The early ‘Desenhos’ possess a rhythm and cadence evocative of both music and geometrical abstraction. By uniting these two modalities, Pape manifested the very tenets of the Neo-Concrete movement that she, along with Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, defined years prior—those which seek to break barriers between the intuitive and the intellectual, the spirit and the body—in the construction of a rebellious, unprecedented, and uniquely Brazilian avant-garde.

The exhibition culminates in one of Lygia Pape’s most emblematic installations, ‘Ttéia 1, C’ (2000/2021), part of the artist’s eponymously titled series first developed in 1978. The word ‘Ttéia,’ which Pape coined, is an elision of the Portuguese word for ‘web’ and ‘teteia,’ a colloquial term for something graceful and delicate. Much like her fellow Neo-Concretists, Lygia Pape was driven by experimentation and a desire to unite the space of the artwork with that of the viewer. The Ttéia series enabled her to do just that. These large-scale installations exist within an ethereal space, comprising practically invisible silver or gold thread stretched by hand from floor to ceiling (Ttéia 1, C) or across the corner of two walls (Ttéia 1, A and Ttéia 1, B). Manifesting an illusion of geometric shapes and planes, ‘Ttéia 1, C’ beckons viewers ever closer, enthralling them in an elusive game of light and shadow. One of these ‘Ttéia 1, C’ installations was shown at the 2009 Venice Biennale and was awarded the Special Mention ‘Fare Mondi // Making Worlds.’

LYGIA PAPE

Lygia Pape’s work traverses a diverse spectrum of media and genres, including sculpture, engraving, painting, drawing, performance, filmmaking, video, and installation art. Born in Nova Friburgo, Rio de Janeiro in 1927, Lygia Pape worked in close dialogue with the Concrete and Neo-Concrete movements active in Brazil during the 1950s and 1960s. Along with her fellow Neo-Concretists, Pape ultimately sought to challenge the tenets of abstraction underpinning the aesthetic philosophy of Concrete art, and to move toward a greater sensorial, organic and phenomenologically attuned mode of expression.

Most recently, Lygia Pape’s work has been exhibited in solo shows at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Serpentine Gallery in London (2011), the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil (2012), the Fondazione Carriero in Milan (2019), the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2018) and at Hauser & Wirth in New York (2018) and London (2016). In 2017, The Met Breuer in New York mounted the first large-scale monographic survey of her work in the United States.

HAUSER & WIRTH

901 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles CA 90013

www.hauserwirth.com

Alfredo Volpi, Paulo Pasta, Elizabeth Jobim @ Galeria Millan, São Paulo - Transitions between passages

Transitions between passages: Alfredo Volpi, Paulo Pasta and Elizabeth Jobim

Curated by Gisela Gueiros

Galeria Millan, São Paulo

November 12 — December 12, 2020

The exhibition transitions between passages, organized by Gisela Gueiros, takes place at Galeria Millan, in São Paulo, in partnership with Galeria Raquel Arnaud. The exhibition, which brings together works by Alfredo Volpi, Paulo Pasta and Elizabeth Jobim, is simultaneously online through the Preview platform, co-founded by curator Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro.

Alfredo Volpi (1896–1988), one of the most celebrated Brazilian painters of the 20th century, is known for exploring color, form and pattern in an abstract vocabulary that depicts elements of everyday life in vibrant compositions – most famously flags and façades. Born in Italy, Volpi moved to a working-class neighborhood of São Paulo with his parents when he was still a baby, in 1897. Early on, he worked as a cabinetmaker, carver and bookbinder. By the time he was 16, he worked as a decorator, painting walls, and started to paint on wood and canvas – an experience that taught him to prepare surfaces and mix pigments. Starting in the 1940s, his work went through a formal simplification. He also embraced tempera, an unusual choice for a contemporary artist, giving his paintings a unique thin texture that was in stark contrast to the impersonality of industrial paint that was a hallmark of the art of the 50s and after. Throughout the next four decades, he navigated between fine art and craft, figuration and abstraction, European influences and Brazilian modernism. 

Notably, Alfredo Volpi never participated in specific artistic movements, nor did he co-sign any of the manifestos of his contemporaries. As the critic Rodrigo Naves writes, “[Volpi] wasn’t a theorist, or someone who would clarify his visual conception through written formulations or debates.” Instead, he combined his study of artists, such as Giotto, when he visits Italy, and Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Giorgio Morandi and Josef Albers, when they are exhibited in Brazil, with a deep interest in Brazilian popular art and traditions. Building something uniquely his.

Now regarded as a master in Brazilian art history, but perhaps less known internationally, Volpi has had a deep impact on many artists, in his lifetime and after – an artist’s artist. This exhibition aims to present his work anew by juxtaposing it with that of Paulo Pasta (b. 1959) and Elizabeth Jobim (b. 1957), two of Brazil’s most important living artists. 

Albers’ seminal 1963 text “Interaction of Color,” in which he muses on how we perceive colors, offers us a way to establish a conversation between Volpi’s paintings and the work of Pasta and Jobim. Albers compares the relationship of colors in a work of art to that of notes in music, writing that “hearing music depends on the recognition of the in-between of the tones, of their placing and of their spacing.” Colors, he explains, “present themselves in continuous flux, constantly related to changing neighbors and changing conditions.” In this interpretation, color is not an absolute, but a relative value, in absolute co-dependency on its context and its perception.

Paulo Pasta has referred to his own flat, non-objective, paintings as schemes or arrangements which keep transforming over time. The artist describes his similarities with Volpi in the following terms: “there is nothing to be told, but something to be revealed.” In his spatial schemes, the transitions of color are the elements used to create this game, the movement, where we see what he describes as “the becoming of an instant itself.” The contrasting or complementing areas of color generate relationships between revealing and concealing. Pasta is particularly interested in what he calls the “concealing” aspects of it. “I am connected to the absence, to the indefinition, to this nebulous zone, this remote place of things with no name.”

These “in-betweens” or pauses also appear in the simple and concise sculptures of Elizabeth Jobim, whose work also explores the meeting of two parts “as if creating something that is neither in one part nor the other,” as the artist puts it. The apparently discrete elements in her work — some are rocks, others, cement — create, in three dimensions, a similar line-space, a similar encounter. “Language is also made of these elements that, when combined, form words” she says. In Volpi, Pasta and Jobim’s work this in-between is best understood as a suspended instant, recognizable in everyday transitions such as between the breathing in and breathing out, the unattainable divide between today and tomorrow, and the ever-receding line between  present and past.

Volpi’s contemporary, Lygia Clark, in her 1956 lecture at the Escola Nacional de Arquitetura in Belo Horizonte, famously named these fundamental transitions as the "organic line”. This ubiquitous “line" — which occurs in the inanimate, such as between a door and its frame; in the human between lips on a cheek; and in the ephemeral, between being asleep and awake — is beyond geometry, beyond architecture and beyond art. Volpi, Pasta and Jobim each try to pry open these cracks to pursue the mysteries within. Their works invite us as viewers to enter an unnamable space, one where, magically, the entire world can fit.

GALERIA MILLAN

Rua Fradique Coutinhou 1360/1416, São Paulo SP

www.galeriamillan.com.br

Alexandre da Cunha @ Galeria Luisa Strina, Sao Paulo - Portal

Alexandre da Cunha: Portal
Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo
February 4 — April 30, 2020

Galeria Luisa Strina presents Portal, a solo show by the artist Alexandre da Cunha, the artist’s sixth in the gallery. Presented in the two exhibiting rooms, it is possible to say that da Cunha exhibits simultaneously two separate and distinct solo shows. In the main space, the artist shows sculptures based on the structure of room dividers made of several materials and objects, such as parachutes, cleaning mops or aluminum trays. In room 2, dating from 1987 and 1998, Alexandre da Cunha shows two series of drawings that highlight themes and concerns present in his earlier production.

Most works structured as folding screens are shown for the first time. There is only one piece from this new body of works that was already shown in 2017, in the artist’s exhibition at Pivô. “It was a kind of door that came to be, as a matter of fact, as an appropriation from the daily labor work in the iron industry; they are sheets of iron primarily used to cut small stencils shapes in order to make repairs and, after having holes dug into them, are discarded.”

This kind of involuntary aesthetics or found eloquence is one of the artist´s work main leitmotifs and is also present in the sculptures made of concrete mixers which dent marks were not made by the artist, but seen by him as a material expression of interest. In the work shown at Pivô, named Portal, another of Alexandre da Cunha’s leitmotif was highlighted: the aesthetics appropriation of the metal modernist sculpture, as in Anthony Caro, William Tucker or Phillip King. With the latter, Alexandre da Cunha had a show in 2018 (Duologue, The Royal Society of Sculptors, London).

In the exhibition Portal, Alexandre da Cunha´s set of works is shown aligned, some of the pieces fastened perpendicularly to the walls and, others, self-supporting on the floor, with no diagonals: one thing after the other. The pieces are made of materials that are placed together and composed with gaps or holes; allowing the viewer to see one work through another. “Many people talk about the environment created in my exhibitions, which is not something that I aim at, as I think of each piece as an individual one, I make sculptures, not installations”, he claims.

Another aspect in this new series is the idea of borders, divisions, frontiers, which was previously explored by the artist in different ways. This seems to reappear here in a special manner because of the inversion that Alexandre da Cunha proposes: instead of creating a series of works which would be recognizable because of the choice of the materials used, a more recurrent practice in his work; in the exhibition only the structure is repeated, as the materials and objects used in the making of the pieces are different. “I have decided to play with this friction between one kind of material ‘against’ the other. This is a group defined by the piece’s typology. They are sculptures that cut through the space”.

Once in the space, the new sculptures develop a dialogue with architecture. The two pieces made of aluminium trays evoke the modernist architecture adapted to tropical weather. At the end of the 40s, the French architect Jean Prouvé designed an easily reproducible modular home in order to solve the housing problem in the French colonies in Africa; two of his Maison Tropicale prototypes were built, one in Nigeria and one in Congo, but the utopic social impact design wasn’t produced in large scale. However, the idea of the pre-fabricated object that is transformed in work of art is still alive in Alexandre da Cunha’s silver dividing frames: light and airy, they are made of inverted patterns (from horizontal to vertical, from table or oven to an elegant group piled inside a white cube), its social function (ready-made plate, industrial kitchen) hidden so that the materials can support themselves vertically as a sculptural presence.

About the drawings, Alexandre da Cuhna clarifies that he was surprised when revisiting these two work groups: one of the groups that deliberately emphasizes the figurative and narrative drawing lines; the other consisting of drawn volumes, something that could be considered closer to the research for which he has become known for. What he is interested in sharing from this (re)discovery is the presence of themes and gestures in those drawings that continue to star in his work: eroticism, for example.

ALEXANDRE DA CUNHA

“My working pro­cess is based on my observation of objects. I have always been intrigued by the massive amount of stuff one needs to live and the roles of objects in our surroundings. I am interested in the processes of design, man­ufacture, and distribution of them among ourselves. A great deal of my work consists of forcing myself to learn about the struc­tures of ordinary objects and the narratives behind them, their cultural uses and their im­plications in society. The method of transfor­mation or play with their appearance often happens through very subtle alterations; I believe this process has more to do with tim­ing than physical intervention, though. It is about creating a platform and allowing the viewer to see something familiar from a priv­ileged point of view.” [Alexandre da Cunha, in an interview to Jochen Volz for the magazine Mousse, 2017]

Recent solo shows include: Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples (upcoming, 2020); Duologue – collaboration with Phillip King, The Royal Society of Sculptors, London, England (2018); Boom, Pivô, São Paulo (2017); Mornings, Office Baroque, Brussels (2017); Free Fall, Thomas Dane Gallery, London (2016); Amazons, CRG Gallery, New York (2015); Real, Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo (2015).

Among Alexandre Da Cunha’s public intervention are works commissioned by Art on the Underground for Battersea Subway Station, Northern Line Extension, London (2021); for the Berkley Square, London (upcoming, 2020); by Samuels & Associates, Pierce Boston Collection, Boston (2017); MCA Chicago, part of the Plaza Project (2015), and Rochaverá Corporate Towers, in São Paulo (2015).

Important group shows include: Inaugural exhibition of The Box, Plymouth, UK (upcoming, 2020); Contemporary Sculpture Fulmer, Buckinghamshire village of Fulmer, UK (2019); Abstracción Textil, Galería Casas Riegner, Bogotá (2018); Soft Power, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2016); ‘Brazil, Beleza?! Contemporary Brazilian Sculpture’, Museum Beelden aan Zee, The Hague (2016);  British Art Show 8, Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds (2015); Cruzamentos –Contemporary Art in Brazil, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2014); ‘When Attitudes Became Form Become Attitudes’, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2013); Decorum: Tapis et tapisseres d’artistes, Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2013); 30th São Paulo Biennial (2012).

His work is part of the following collections: Tate Collection, England; Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, Brazil; Centro de Arte Contemporânea Inhotim, Brumadinho, Brazil; CIFO Cisneros Collection, USA; Zabludowicz Collection, England; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil; FAMA, Itu, Brazil.

GALERIA LUISA STRINA
Rua Padre João Manuel 755 Cerqueira César
01411-001 São Paulo SP
galerialuisastrina.com.br

Visions of Brazil @ Blum & Poe Gallery, NYC - Reimagining Modernity from Tarsila to Sonia, Curated by Sofia Gotti

Visions of Brazil: Reimagining Modernity from Tarsila to Sonia, Curated by Sofia Gotti
Blum & Poe, New York
Through June 21, 2019

Blum & Poe presents Visions of Brazil: Reimagining Modernity from Tarsila to Sonia, curated by Sofia Gotti, hosted in collaboration with Mendes Wood DM. Following a tradition of championing critical reassessments of historical art movements beginning with Mono-ha with curator Mika Yoshitake, then Dansaekhwa curated by Joan Kee, and CoBrA with curator Alison M. Gingeras, to 1980s and 1990s Japan again with Yoshitake, Blum & Poe focuses on a revised Modernist narrative of Brazil. This exhibition gathers works that together span almost a century of Brazilian art, from Modernism to the present day.

This exhibition positions itself as a cartography for navigating current debates within the US and the Americas surrounding the formation of Modernism in Brazil. Works by Tarsila do Amaral, Sergio Camargo, Willys de Castro, Lygia Clark, Raymundo Colares, Antonio Dias, Sonia Gomes, Alberto da Veiga Guignard, Leonilson, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Mira Schendel, Rubem Valentim, and Alfredo Volpi trace this pluralist history that winds through anthropophagy, feminist agendas, Afro-Catholic cultural genealogy, and more. 

Upon considering this collection of Brazilian works within the framework of modernity, the first issue exhibition curator Sofia Gotti seeks to address is the concept of modernity itself. Historian Walter Mignolo has made the persuasive argument that “modernity is the name for the historical process in which Europe began its progress towards world hegemony, it carries a darker side, coloniality.” If we understand Modernism as the cultural output of modernity, then using this label when analyzing Latin American art becomes problematic due to its colonialist connotations. Visions of Brazil seeks to “reimagine” the Modernist lens that defined a generation, a temporality, a utopian project, a philosophy, by presenting a rereading of this history tethering it to issues around race, power structures, and economics.

Tarsila do Amaral or simply Tarsila (as she is popularly known in her home country) is best known because of how she conjugated a Modernist aesthetic with her research into the roots of Brazilian identity, reflective of its folk and vernacular traditions. Curators Stephanie D’Alessandro and Luis Pérez-Oramas once proclaimed her the inventor of modern art in Brazil. One of Tarsila’s most iconic works, A Negra (1924), is seen in the foreground of the Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibalist Manifesto, 1928) by her husband Oswald de Andrade. Employing the concept of anthropophagy, this manifesto declared Brazilian culture as cannibalistic towards European culture: it devoured it, digested it, absorbed it, and reformulated it into something new. The Anthropophagous movement became a vital source for multiple artists of successive generations—most notably Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, which explains why this phase of Tarsila’s work is so widely referenced.

The work by Tarsila on view for the initial segment of the exhibition—Terra, 1943—is a rare example of her output after the Anthropophagy movement. Specifically, in the years following 1933 the artist adopted an aesthetic closer to Socialist Realism. In 1931 Tarsila visited the Soviet Union and she frequented Communist Party gatherings in Brazil, which caused her to be detained by the authorities for nearly a month. Besides speaking to her leftist political tendencies, the works produced in this period also confront newer female archetypes through less than idealized images of maternity, orphanages, or seamstresses working. Such works were devoid of all those tropical attributes we see in the drawings on view that distinguished her older output. Through the changes in Tarsila’s work, we can make out how her vision of modernity transformed into one more conscious of class, gender, and race-related issues.

A pivotal step in the construction of a revised Modernist narrative has been offered by Pérez-Oramas as well as curator Paulo Herkenhoff who confer that Tarsila was amongst those who inaugurated the modern period in Brazil, while Lygia Clark brought it to an end by literally embodying Tarsila’s Modernist project through her practice. For Pérez-Oramas, “among the various manifestation of South America’s aspirations to modernity […] perhaps none is more fascinating than Brazil’s cannibalistic phantasmagoria, which becomes image in Tarsila’s work, then later becomes body in Clark’s.” Clark’s revolutionary insight into art’s transformative effects on the body and on consciousness is manifest in some of her earliest and iconic experiments with active spectator participation in her Bichos (1961-1963), and Obra Mole (1964), objects made of connected metal sheets or rubber devised to be manipulated by the viewer and to be unpredictable in their movements. If we consider this history rooted in politics, race, and class as the departure point for a narrative of Modernism, it is possible to argue that it did not come to a close with Clark, but that it remains an ongoing project.

Such discussions offer the perspective that certain socio-political and economic conditions do not allow for the full realization of that Modernist utopia imagined in the 1920s and 1960s, suggesting it may still be a work in progress. When we turn to the work of an artist such as Sonia Gomes, a new facet of this narrative appears. Gomes’ works are still entangled with certain aesthetic tropes contained in the practices of Tarsila or Lygia Clark, though she is the first from this group who is non-white, coming from a bi-racial background, and who did not train in Paris. Gomes makes her works by using fabrics found or gifted from friends and family. Her choice of materials is also a reference to her growing up in a town in the state of Minas Gerais, which has amongst the oldest traditions of textile production. Her research approximates Tarsila’s inasmuch as it draws from Brazil’s localized cultural makeup. Her works have a corporeal presence that engages and involves viewers. Yet, by employing techniques such as weaving and embroidery, and for using unpretentious found materials (traditionally dismissed as feminine or craft), Gomes’ work brings to light a wholly different set of references. Her practice is positioned at an important point of juncture where it embodies simultaneously different visions of modernity. When asked why she recognized her own practice as art so late in life, she explained that the conditions were not ripe to do so. In other words, her work could not have entered the cultural discourse at an earlier date because the transformative potential it was offering would not have been recognized.

Visions of Brazil: Reimagining Modernity from Tarsila to Sonia positions works by Brazilian Modernists (such as Tarsila and Alfredo Volpi) alongside others made by artists working outside of Modernism's canonical time bracket (Gomes, Leonilson), allowing us to deconstruct what Modernism may stand for; and by rooting this rereading in politics, race, and class, we may support a visual narrative of Brazilian Modernism suspended on diversity and equality.

Dr. Sofia Gotti is a scholar and curator based in Milan. She has taught at The Courtauld Institute of Art and the University of the Arts London, and currently lectures at Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti (NABA), Milan. Her research centers on feminist art practices in Latin America and Italy. She has worked with organizations including the Feminist Institute, Castello di Rivoli, FM Centre for Contemporary Art, Tate Modern, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

A panel discussion on the occasion of the exhibition has been held at the Americas Society on Thursday, May 2, with Sofia Gotti and curators Gabriela Rangel (Americas Society) and Sergio Bessa (Bronx Museum), and with contributions by Kiki Mazzucchelli and Sergio Martins. 

BLUM & POE, NEW YORK
19 East 66th Street, New York, NY 10065
www.blumandpoe.com

Magdalena Jitrik @ Galeria Luisa Strina, Sao Paulo - El Silencio

Magdalena Jitrik: El Silencio
Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo
June 5 — July 27 2019

Why call “silence” an exhibition that has so much to say? Eight paintings and a set of objects compose Magdalena Jitrik’s fourth solo exhibition at Galeria Luisa Strina. It is as an enigma to be deciphered. Perhaps the most mysterious of the paintings, which at first sight appears to be the representation of a pair of eyes on a red concrete bulky formation, evokes the glances cast by the seated female figure in the lower right corner of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, as well as the dying woman, outstretched arms in a surrendering posture, on the right side on the Guernica painting. The reference to Picasso is not direct nor fundamental, but it is known that the Argentine artist uses historical vanguards, from cubism and surrealism to the De Stijl and Bauhaus, in her critical reinterpretation of modernisms.

The resemblance to Picasso´s paintings is due less to the work by the Spaniard than to Picasso’s appropriation of primitivism, after all, the aesthetic choice to abandon perspective in favor of the two-dimensionality was deliberately adopted in Les Demoiselles in order to “épater la bourgeoisie”, who was used to traditional European painting, is revised by Magdalena Jitrik in her deliberate use of perspective. In her paintings, Magdalena usually inserts visual contradictions between background and figure. The smoky effect on several of the pictures presented in El Silencio produces not only a sensation of a floating volume, but also projects the figure back and forth in an infinite dynamism.

It is important to remember that in 1907 Matisse classified The Young Women of Avignon as a bad taste joke, and today the painting is considered the genesis of the Cubist revolution. On one hand, if Les Demoiselles founded cubism, Guernica is the movement’s greatest icon. As it is known, the title of Pablo Picasso’s monumental painting derives from the name of the Spanish village that was the first urban area to undergo aerial bombing on April 26, 1937, by the German military air force that backed up the Francoist dictatorship during the Spanish Civil War, prologue to the Second World War. Nowadays, and over the years since then, this work is considered a peace symbol and a libel against war atrocities, of any war. It is said that when a Nazi official saw the painting, he allegedly asked Picasso: “Did you produce this horror, sir?”, To what the artist replied “No, you did”.

Magdalena Jitrik’s exhibition can be thought as a manifesto against the archipelago of arrogance that condemns us to silence. The more geometric works of the show have a Mondrian felling to them, who is also revisited in a sideway manner, logically. It is symptomatic that the pieces assembled in the gallery shed light to the Manifesto I (1918), by the group De Stijl to the present, a century and two great wars later:

There is an old and new understanding of time. The old one is related to the individual. The new one is related to the universal. The dispute between individual and universal is shown both in global wars and in contemporary art. 

War is destroying the old world and its content: predominance of the individual in all fields. 

The new art has brought to light what is contained in the new understanding of time: a balance between the universal and the individual. 

The new understanding of time is prepared to take place in both the inner and outer life.

Tradition, dogmas and the predominance of the individual (of the natural) are preventing this understanding. 

Therefore, the founders of the new plastic arts ask everyone who believes in the reform of art and culture to annihilate these development obstacles, just as they annihilated in the new plastic arts (abolishing natural forms) what prevents any pure artistic expression, the ultimate consequence of all art forms. 

Current artists, driven by the same consciousness throughout the world, took part in the world war against the domain of individualism and authoritarianism from an intellectual point of view. They commiserate, then, with all who fight, intellectually or materially, for the formation of a life union, in art, in culture.

The war against individualism, in Magdalena Jitrik’s career, is perhaps most evident in her militancy ahead of the Popular Workshop on Screen Printing, with Mariela Scafati and Diego Posadas, in the year 2000. With this collective, for example, the Argentine took part in the 27th Bienal of São Paulo in 2006 curated by Lisette Lagnado – an exhibition that disseminated the concept of relational aesthetics by the Frenchman Nicolas Bourriaud in Brazil and is now considered a turning point in the history of the Biennial, firstly by abolishing national representations, but mainly for having placed on the agenda of the art system the artists´ researches that focused on collaboration and cohabitation, or else, on the values ​​of “living together”, which was borrowed from Roland Barthes´ work, that was the expression that gave the 2006 Biennial its name, Como Viver Junto. The union that the artists fought for a century ago was revived in Latin America and around the world in the year 2000 and again, at the beginning of the following decade, in the Arab Spring (2011) and in the Days of June, in Brazil (2013).

Let’s return to the painting that seemed to portray a pair of eyes and see there two birds that touch each other with the tip of their beaks, two people who are in dialogue, or yet the symbol of infinity. “It was a picture where visuality and materiality emerged, somewhat arbitrarily, in the process of producing the works for the solo show at Luisa Strina. I do not have a lot to say about this work, unless I see in it something about communication, communication as a symbol of something continuous, something infinite, “reflects Magdalena Jitrik. The artist´s show tells us, in the end, that, even when we cannot speak, silence promotes the reflection that leads to an infinite conversation with the other.

MAGDALENA JITRIK

Magdalena Jitrik (1966) was born in Buenos Aires, where she lives and works. From 1974 to 1987, the artist lived in México, where she studied visual arts at Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas. She has been showing her work since 1990, when she had her first solo show at Galería del Rojas. She was one of the founders of the Argentine art collective Taller Popular de Serigrafía (2002 -2007), with whom she created an intervention of graphic art in the 27th Bienal de São Paulo (2006). Jitrik has joined the biennials of Porto Alegre, Brazil (2009); Thessaloniki, Greece (2009); Trienal Poligráfica de Puerto Rico (2009), Istambul, Turky (2011) and Manifesta 9, Genk, Belgium (2012).

Recent solo exhibitions include: Venceremos // Black is Beautiful, Centro Cultural Universidad Nacional General Sarmiento e Casa Doblas, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2017); Vanguardia – America, MACBA, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2016); Modern Painting, Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, Brazil (2014); El Fin, el Principio, Fundación Universidad Di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2013); International Lantern, The Beltable Center, Limerick, Ireland (2012); La Linterna Internacional, Museo Castagnino, Santa Fe, Argentina (2012).

Recent group shows include: Potência e Adversidade – Art from Latin America at the collections of Portugal, Museu de Lisboa / Pavilhão Branco and Pavilhão Preto, Lisboa, Portugal (2017); Verboamérica, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires (2016); Retour sur l’Abîme – l’art à l’épreuve du génocide, Les Musées de Belfort, France (2015); El teatro de la pintura, Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires (2014).

Public Collections holding her work include: MACBA Barcelona; Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Rosario (MACRo), Rosario, Argentina; Museo de Bellas Artes de Bahía Blanca, Argentina; FRAC – Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, Marseille, France; Fundación ARTEBA, Buenos Aires; MALBA – Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires; Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo, Madrid, Spain; Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, UNAM, México.

GALERIA LUISA STRINA
Rua Padre João Manuel 755
Cerqueira César 01411-001
São Paulo SP Brazil
www.galerialuisastrina.com.br

Miguel Rio Branco: Maldicidade @ Galeria Luisa Strina, Sao Paulo + Book Published by Taschen

Miguel Rio Branco: Maldicidade
Solo show & launch of a book published by TASCHEN
Galeria Luisa Strina, Sao Paulo
June 5 - July 27, 2019

“As a constellation of blatant urbanity entropy in cities distributed on varied latitudes and longitudes, even though the eye-conciousness does not resist looking for clues to which cities and countries the portrayed spaces were produced in, it is important that, in the face of Maldicidade, the moment in which the eye-skin assumes the impossibility of the task and realizes that the city is only one, after all: about what great cities, if its recent history and territorial extension are taken into consideration, could it be said that it does not know these images? 

(…) ‘Murió El Cuerpo’, says the headline on the newspaper held by a boy leaning against the side of a precarious settlement. It is difficult to understand who the original headline was referring to, but in this context, it is the body of the so-called Western civilization which, having achieved unprecedented scale and power in the planet’s history, caves in crushed under the very weight of the ideals it has nurtured”, curator Paulo Miyada writes in an unpublished essay, on the occasion of Miguel Rio Branco’s solo show  in Oi Futuro, Rio de Janeiro, in 2017.

Maldicidade, a work in progress by Miguel Rio Branco, only existed until now in photobook format, published by CosacNaify in 2014, and as stand-alone works or sets of photographs in narrative (polyptych) made during the artist’s stay in different cities where his international career took him to. Firstly, as a diplomat´s child, beginning with painting, until the end of the 1960s, later as a photography director in Brazilian film documentaries and then as a correspondent of the Magnum agency in the 1980s. Finally, as a multidisciplinary artist, he exhibited in institutions such as The Art Institute of Boston; Photo Forum, Frankfurt; Aperture’s Burden Gallery, NY; Maison Européenne de La Photographie, Paris; Rencontres d’Arles; Museum of Contemporary Art of Tokyo; Casa América, Madrid; Kulturhuset, Stockholm; and MASP; besides being one of the artists honored with a pavilion at the Inhotim Institute. In June 2019, Luisa Strina Gallery presents Maldicidade, a solo exhibition, showing about 20 works. At the opening, the artist launches a so titled book, in a new edition, by Taschen.

MIGUEL RIO BRANCO, Maldicidade 

with texts by Paulo Herkenhoff

Hardcover, 24.5 x 33 cm, 464 pages

Availability: June 2019

Published by TASCHEN: www.taschen.com

Photo © Miguel Rio Branco, Courtesy TASCHEN

Although there are new developments in the Maldicidade series, the text by Paulo Miyada continues to be current and precise. The city is one. All the works selected by Miguel Rio Branco for the solo show in the gallery picture the pulsating metropolis, between exuberance and misery, vibrant colors and nocturnal vapors, poetic abstractions and honest denouncements. About what big city could it be said that these contrasts are not known? Merging photos published in 2014 with new ones, which are only be revealed in the Taschen’s book and in the exhibition, the artist does not consider it relevant to think the image on these terms – “new”, “unpublished” etc. – because, according to him, “what the unprecedented amounts to is the construction and the intention”, that is, the edition of a book or a group of photographs to be enlarged, the sequence in which the images are presented, the context in which each snapshot is placed in relation to others – by approach or repulsion -, formal, narrative, color and so on, it always creates an unprecedented experience.

“The Taschen version has a new dynamic, possibly a little less melancholy, but placing importance, in addition to the construction, to the complete reading of each image. We see the details otherwise not perceivable in the small format. It ends up becoming a different book. A bit like some jazzy musical performances. As my work was being shown at the Magnum gallery in Paris (1985), it was critically defined by the photographer Denis Stock as if I had tried to create music with photographs: perhaps the greatest praise they have ever been given”, says Miguel Rio Branco about the book.

Since 1977, with “Strangler in a strangled land” and also the exhibition Negativo Sujo (1978), coming from painting and cinema, the artist has begun to create poetic narratives with assemblages made with groups of photographs; already then at that moment, the idea of a single photo, “a decisive moment”, has not been enough for him; the field of the image, according to him, needed a visual narrative context. “A set of pieces can reach a final format in the dialogue among them, just as others, by individual force, do not need or cannot be in sets, they are fully complete individually. The cement that unites them in different constructions is what creates the rhythm and the concepts that complete the works, even provisionally”, he explains.

Following this logic, at the exhibition Maldicidade, the visitor is faced, for example, with the Black and Rose with Flag diptych, a nearly perfect meeting between geometric patterns – one in an inside environment, another one caught on the street – where both depict an element in a state of suspension, the “punctum” of both, to connect with Roland Barthes, that unites them, or that cements, although provisionally, the construction of the diptych. Near this set of pictures, however, the spectator can contemplate Blue and Red Shoes, shown as a single piece in all its narrative force, without the need of another image to complement it, even though, in the most recent edition of the São Paulo Biennial, the same work was seen in a polyptych, entitled Geometry of Desire.

“My work is like a tide of images that can take different directions, as in a sea of images that create poetic discourses that often unravel their documentary capacity, generating more meaning. They create rhythms and meaning that obliterate a simple proposal of reality. ”

After Negativo Sujo, Miguel Rio Branco showed, at the 1983 São Paulo Biennial, an audiovisual piece called Dialogues with Amaú, composed of five translucent screens on which a sequence of images of a deaf-mute kayapó boy was projected in connection to other images of his life and images of the white civilization that surrounded his village. “The connections had a rhythm of their own, but they generated random, but significant relationships in the images choice; the work falls in the area defined by Hélio Oiticica as Almost Cinema”, tells us the artist. This work is permanently exhibited in the pavilion dedicated to the work of Miguel Rio Branco in Inhotim, and is considered one of the most iconic works of expanded photography by a Brazilian artist.

Still on the subject of the book and its relation with great cities, Miguel Rio Branco alleges that “the changes were provoked specially by issues related to the new size and by the city that attracts me, clearly not all, even less by ours that become more and more precarious structurally, but MALDICIDADE came from a mixture of the French expression. ‘mal d’amour’, love pain, and a damned city: sometimes I feel revulsion and, sometimes, attraction. But, I still think cities are on an irreversible path to terror after they reach a certain size, after an exaggeration made of millions of people. I do not think large concentrations of people are healthy; today, they seem to me a great attraction to disaster”.

MIGUEL RIO BRANCO

Born in 1946, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, Miguel Rio Branco lives and works in Araras, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Graduated in the New York Institute of Photography and at the Superior School of Industrial Design, Rio de Janeiro, he began to show photographs and films in 1972, developing a documentary work with a strong poetic load. In the 1980s, he was acclaimed internationally for his films and photographs in the form of prizes, publications and exhibitions, such as the Grand Prize of the First Triennial of Photography of the Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo, and the prize Kodak de la Critique Photographique, 1982, in France.

Recent solo shows include: Nada levarei qundo morrer, MASP – Museu de Arte de São Paulo (2017); Wishful Thinking, Oi Futuro, Rio de Janeiro (2017); From Tokyo to Out of Nowhere, Galeria Filomena Soares, Portugal (2016); New York Sketches, Magnum Photo Gallery, Paris (2016); and Color Theory, Pinacoteca de São Paulo (2014).

Recent group shows include: Southern Geometries, from Mexico to Patagonia, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris (2018); 33th São Paulo Biennial (2018); Door into Darkness, Galerija Kula, Institute Haru – Milesi Palace and The Institute for Scientific and Artistic Work, Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Split, Crotia (2018); 11th Mercosur Biennial, Porto Alegre (2018).

The artist has works in the collection of important institutions such as Museum of Modern Art Rio de Janeiro; Museum of Modern Art São Paulo; MASP – Museum of Art of São Paulo; George Pompidou Center, Paris; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum of Photographic Arts of San Diego; and Metropolitan Museum, New York.

GALERIA LUISA STRINA 
Rua Padre João Manuel 755
Cerqueira César 01411-001
São Paulo SP Brazil
www.galerialuisastrina.com.br