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

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

_______________

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

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

Carlos Garaicoa @ Galeria Luisa Strina, Sao Paulo - Landscapes of labour

Carlos Garaicoa: Landscapes of labour
Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo
April 3 - May 25, 2019

Carlos Garaicoa shows sculptures, drawings and installations specially produced for the solo show at Galeria Luisa Strina, focusing on modernist architecture and the paradoxes between the beauty of the utopian urban landscape and the efforts and manual labor involved in its construction (both historically and daily – in the artist’s own process of creation).

The exhibition is composed of 4 “work tables” in which the artist painted enlarged Oscar Niemeyer blueprints; these works are titled Power, Justice, Dance and Death. Around this set, the artist installs drawings of wires connected by nails and old rulers, directly on the wall. These also allude to the modernist architecture and the ideals of this unfinished civilizational project, especially in Latin America.

New works from the Puzzles series, which began in 2018, complete the exhibition, in which photographs of Cuba’s urban landscape are enlarged on pieces of puzzles in bluish tones. In part of the surface of the jigsaw puzzle photography where the architecture is ruined, Carlos Garaicoa disassembles the puzzle, leaving in what remains of the “original” landscape; under the collapse of the small pieces, a black and white image of the same places is visible, installed as a second layer, in the background, depicting the urban ruin.

CARLOS GARAICO

‘I take a multidisciplinary approach to issues of culture and politics, particularly Cuban, through the study of architecture, urbanism, and history. My main subject and inspiration have always been the architecture of the city of Havana and the Cuban way of life, but there are also parallels with many other cities that I visit, which also inspire me.’

Highlighted recent solo exhibitions: Ser Urbano, Espaço Cultural Porto Seguro, São Paulo (2018); Nada veo, nada digo, nada oigo, UNAICC (Unión Nacional de Arquitectos, Ingenieros de la Construcción de Cuba), Havana, Cuba (2018); Parasol Unit, London, England (2018); El Palacio de las tres historias, Fondazione Merz, Turin, Italy (2017), and CGAC – Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain (2018); Yo nunca he sido surrealista hasta el día de hoy, MAAT Museu de Arte, Arquitetura e Tecnologia, Lisbon, Portugal (2017); Orden Inconcluso, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, Germany (2016); The Politics and Poetics of Space, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo, Norway (2015).

Recent group shows include: Condemned to be Modern, LAMAG Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles (2017); Please come back. The World as a Prison?, MAXXI Museo e Nazionale Delle Arti del XXI Secolo, Rome, Italy (2017); Cuba: Tatuare La Storia, Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea (PAC), Milan, Italy (2016); El Tormento y el Éxtasis, Es Baluard, Palma, Spain (2016); Labor Relations, Wrocław Contemporary Museum, Wrocław, Poland (2016); Nuevos territorios: laboratorios de diseño, artesanía y arte en Latinoamérica, Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico (2016); CUBA LIBRE, Cuba contemporánea desde la visión de Peter Ludwig, Museum Ludwig, Koblenz, Germany (2016); Transhumance, beyond human horizon, Centre d’Art de Bruxelles (CAB), Brussels, Belgium (2016); 12a Havana Biennial Cuba (2015).

Some of the collections his work is part of are: Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; LACMA Los Angeles County Museum, USA; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Dallas Museum of Art, USA; MUSAC – Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain; Centre Pompidou, France; Museo Nacional de Arte Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Tate Colleciton, London; MOCA Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; MOMA Museum of Modern Art, New York; Inhotim Institute of Contemporary Art, Brumadinho, MG, Brazil.

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

Jimmie Durham, Cildo Meireles, Pedro Cabrita Reis @ Galeria Luisa Strina, Sao Paulo

Jimmie Durham, Cildo Meireles, Pedro Cabrita Reis
Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo
April 3 - May 25, 2019

Galeria Luisa Strina presents a group show including works by Jimmie Durham, Cildo Meireles, and Pedro Cabrita Reis. The exhibition features works by the three internationally renowned conceptual artists who have in common to work on simple materials and everyday life items reassembled in order to gain a suggestive power of association.

The show is organized in collaboration with Sprovieri Gallery, London, where it was presented from October 2nd to November 23, 2018.

Pedro Cabrita Reis presents three new works realized specifically for the show. His complex practice is characterized by an idiosyncratic philosophical and poetical discourse embracing a great variety of means: painting, photography, drawing, and sculptures composed of industrial and found materials alongside with manufactured objects. Focused on questions relative to space and memory, the equilibrium between light and matter is expressed in the balance between architecture and image and “creates a reality in its own right, instead of reproducing it”. (Pedro Cabrita Reis)

In Jimmie Durham’s sculptures and assemblages appears a mix of organic and artificial found items (including bones, plastic pieces, car parts and pipes), often re-composed questioning the fragile balance between nature and industry. The various elements co-exist among them in a visual clash at the same time poetic, funky, and decadent building up ambiguous and potentially endless layers of meaning. “We are in search of structures of signification: underneath a picture there is always another picture”. (Jimmie Durham)

Each piece in the show opens to new interpretations of the world and subverts its rules. Paradigmatic is Cildo Meireles’s work, where often the viewer’s perception, or even imagination, has an active role capable to alter it. In the lightbox Atlas (1995-2006), instead, the artist portrays himself – not without irony – as an opposite version of the myth of Atlas. Smiling, Meireles is standing upside down on Piero Manzoni’s famous pedestal of the world, Base del Mondo. In the words of the artist: “I am interested in the paradoxical relationship between objects”. (Cildo Meireles)

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