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
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