Apr 19 – May 31, 2014

Luhring Augustine is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Tunga. This marks the artist’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery and includes sculptures and drawings conceived over the past few years. For four decades Tunga has created a complex personal mythology through his integrated and evocative body of work, which includes sculpture, installation, performance, film, drawing, and writing. His practice is a synthesis of multifarious interests in poetry, psychology, physics, alchemy, and metaphysics, and is expressed with a distinctive sensual and poetic sensibility.

Following in the tradition of Joseph Beuys’s ceremonial environments, Tunga relies on a repeated use of symbolic materials such as crystals, sponges, rubber, wood, bronze, glass vessels, and ceramics. The tripod is a recurring structural component in his new sculptures, which incorporate such variety of media and resemble monumental totemic objects resulting from an enigmatic ritual. Tunga’s new ink drawings made on diaphanous handmade paper address similar concerns as those developed in his sculptures; each features a continuous line, linking disparate bodily forms that overlap to create larger anthropomorphic images, which emerge and recede. For Tunga, the drawings bring to mind “formulas, recipes, concoctions,” and “evoke scenes from pre-scientific iconography where an image can be translated into an element of transmutation.” As art historian Michael Asbury has noted, at the heart of Tunga’s practice lies a “desire to uncover the mystical undercurrents of modernity.”

Born in 1952, Tunga lives and works in Rio de Janeiro and is widely considered one of the leading Brazilian artists of his generation. He has had numerous solo exhibitions at museums internationally, and has presented major installations at the Venice Biennale, Documenta X, and four iterations of the São Paulo Biennial, in which he will be featured for a fifth time later this year. His work is included in the permanent collections of several institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. In September 2012 a second major permanent pavilion dedicated to Tunga opened at the Instituto de Arte Contemporânea Inhotim in Brumadinho, Brazil. Most recently, Tunga was included in Brasiliana: Installations from 1960 to the Present at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt am Main, and in Imagine Brazil, which originated at the Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo and will be traveling to several institutions throughout Europe, Russia, and Brazil.

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present Album, an exhibition of new large-scale photographs by Vik Muniz on view from April 10 through May 10, 2014.

Album presents two new bodies of work – the eponymous Album series as well as Postcards from Nowhere. Muniz continues to explore the contemporary fragmented visual experience, with an increased emphasis on nostalgia and the materiality of photography.

The Album series utilizes found personal photographs, many treated in sepia tone, collected by Muniz over a number of years. The images composed are of familiar scenes that may be found in family photo albums – a portrait of a baby, a wedding, a school picture, or a vacation snapshot. These images reflect intimate yet universal narratives. With the proliferation of inexpensive cameras in the late 20th century, and by the ease and speed of digital documentation in more recent years, such images have become more common and less precious. Album questions the implications of these shifts in technology and image-making, and their impact on community, collective experience, and memory.

Postcards from Nowhere is similarly concerned with issues of loss and the dissemination of images. The rise of technology has greatly altered the material value of the postcard, as well as its traditional importance as a personal, tactile, and unique keepsake. The Postcards depict lost or drastically changed popular destinations – the Twin Towers in the New York Financial District, a once-luxurious beach in Beirut – that have been affected by technology as well as violence.

Born in São Paulo, Brazil in 1961, Vik Muniz is recognized for his photographs of reimagined largely art historical imagery, which he creates out of a wide variety of materials—from chocolate and sugar to junk and toys. His work has been exhibited widely throughout the globe and is included in numerous international public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Tate Gallery, London; Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Brazil; and Fondation Cartier pour L’Art Contemporain, Paris. Current solo exhibitions are on view at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art through April 27, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art through August 2.

Muniz currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Adriana Varejão, Polvo Oil Colors, 2013. Wooden box with acrylic cover, containing 33 aluminum oil paint tubes, 14 ⅛ x 20 ⅛ x 3 ⅛ in.

New York, April 3, 2014—For her fifth exhibition with the gallery, Lehmann Maupin is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new works by one of Brazil’s leading artists, Adriana Varejão, opening April 24, 2014. Through painting, sculpture, installation and photography, Varejão addresses themes of colonialism, miscegenation and anthropology in Brazil, one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world. The artist will be present for an opening reception on Thursday, April 24 from 6 to 8PM.

Varejão’s newest body of work, Polvo, expands her exploration of miscegenation—the mixture of races—with a series of self-portraits that highlights the spectrum of interracial identity in Brazil, where historically race has assumed a social and cultural function. Varejão often uses the term mestizaje, as it embodies the concept of miscegenation, though indiscriminate of the combination of ethnicities.

Varejão’s influences include the baroque, history and ceramics, as well as art history; she weaves these together to show the impact of the Euro-centric worldview on the New World. Colonial Spanish casta paintings, a 17th and 18th century genre characteristic of New Spain and particularly prevalent in colonial Mexico that sought to document the varieties of interracial mixing in an attempt to classify and frame racial diversity and hybridity throughout a complex caste system, and a 1976 racial census issued by the Brazilian government, served as inspiration for this series. The government survey asked Brazilian citizens to describe their own skin color, resulting in 136 different metaphorical descriptions. From these Varejão selected the most linguistically poetic descriptions, varying from Sapecada (Flirting with Freckles), Café com Leite (Milky Coffee), Burro quando Foge (Faded Fawn) and Queimada de Sol (Sun Kissed), and depicts herself as she envisions with each of these skin tones. The artist groups these works together as triptychs, so that comparisons can be made between the various self-assessments of race.

Varejão also created her own set of oil paints as part of the series, which will be displayed alongside the portraits. Branded by the artist under the name Polvo (meaning “octopus” in Portuguese), each color of flesh-toned paint in the set corresponds with the descriptions from the survey. The logo of the octopus was chosen as its dark-colored ink consists primarily of melanin, the same natural pigmentation found in human hair and skin. The sets will be accompanied by two color wheel paintings depicting the various shades of Polvo oil paints.

Varejão’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States will take place at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston in November 2014. The exhibition will feature a survey of her work from 1988 to 2014, including paintings from the Polvo series.

About Adriana Varejão

Born in 1964 in Rio de Janeiro, where she lives and works, Adriana Varejão is one of Brazil’s leading contemporary artists. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Tate Modern, London; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Hara Museum, Tokyo; the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris; Fundación “la Caixa”, Barcelona; and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, among others. Varejão has exhibited extensively internationally, with solo shows at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris (2005); Hara Museum, Japan (2007); Museu de Arte Moderna de Sao Paulo, Brazil (2012); Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2013) and Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Argentina (2013). Varejão’s work was included in the São Paulo Biennial (1994 and 1998), Sydney Biennial (2001), Site Santa Fé (2004), Mercosul Biennial in Visual Art, Brazil (1997 and 2005), Liverpool Biennial (1999 and 2006) and 12th International Istanbul Biennial, Turkey (2011), among others. Most recently her work was featured prominently in Cruzamentos: Contemporary Art in Brazil at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, OH and in Imagine Brazil at the Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo, Norway. She also has a permanent pavilion devoted to her work at the Centro de Arte Contemporânea Inhotim in Brazil that opened in 2008.

About Lehmann Maupin

Founded in 1996 by partners Rachel Lehmann and David Maupin, Lehmann Maupin has fostered the careers of a diverse group of internationally renowned artists, both emerging and established, working in multiple disciplines and across varied media. With three locations—two in New York and one in Hong Kong—the gallery represents artists from the United States, Europe, Asia, South America, Africa and the Middle East. Known for championing artists who create groundbreaking and challenging forms of visual expression, Lehmann Maupin presents work highlighting personal investigations and individual narratives through conceptual approaches that often address such issues as gender, class, religion, history, politics and globalism.

Upcoming Exhibitions

Lee Bul, May 2–June 21, 2014, New York

Hernan Bas, Case Studies, May 13–June 28, 2014, Hong Kong

Mickalene Thomas, Tête de Femme, June 27–August 9, 2014, New York

Gilbert & George, June 27–August 9, 2014, New York

For more information on Adriana Varejão or other gallery artists, please contact Marta de Movellan at Lehmann Maupin on +1 212 255 2923 or visit www.lehmannmaupin.com.

Mais uma colaboração antiga do Gustavo Prado que coloco agora no ar só agora. Para ver todas as colunas do Gustavo basta clicar GP/NY na aba das categorias aí ao lado.

)

Alegria!

Ontem Mariana me levou para assistir ao documentário de Wim Wenders sobre Pina Bausch, e por mais que eu não saiba avaliar se há nele uma real inovação sobre a forma de filmar dança, não me lembro de ter jamais assistido um uso tão necessário dos recursos 3D em cinema. Perto da forma com que foi usado em Pina, outras aplicações até aqui, são meras anedotas e adereços, um toque monótono, monocórdio, do susto ou da vertigem.

Quero ser capaz de escrever mais para frente algo mais apropriado sobre o filme, que me tocou profundamente, sobretudo, por me fazer compreender um pouco melhor a dimensão e a importância de Pina. Estranha essa sensação de querer conversar com alguém que não faz parte do seu tempo, tenho que parar de sentir isso, essa semana tentei ligar para o Manet e ninguém atendeu, agora fiquei pensando em escrever para Pina, mas há que se ter limite.

Impressiona muito a capacidade dela, de pensar do mais profundamente triste e trágico, ao mais engraçado e alegre. É bonita a forma com que o filme apresenta o uso que ela faz de seus bailarinos, a capacidade que ela tem de incorporar às suas narrativas um pouco das origens, dos sentimentos e da identidade de quem dança para ela. Esse vídeo que escolhi, é um dos exemplos mais bonitos disso no filme. E me fez pensar no sentido de expressão, que já se tornou há muito tempo um chavão, um lugar-comum que é usado com tanta banalidade na forma de se abordar uma obra de arte, por ser quase sempre a descrição de um processo dramático no qual o artista expurga seus sentimentos íntimos pela obra. Eca! Coisa cafona, que todos nós já ouvimos tantas vezes, principalmente quando se trata de um solista, de um ator ou de um pintor, que são, supostamente, atividades artísticas mais vinculadas a um certo sentido de individualidade, de autonomia, e com isso – de “expressividade”. Pois bem, no caso desse bailarino, o que poderíamos preguiçosamente chamar da sua forma de expressar uma alegria, é colocado com tão maior interesse e inteligência, num momento valioso do filme, em que passamos a conhecer mais sobre o processo dela.

Ele diz que Pina os colocou uma pergunta, sobre como seria um movimento relacionado a alegria, ou ânimo em movimento, logo em seguida, você ouve ele dizer, num espanhol tão bonito, que era uma pergunta linda! E esse é o ponto, um dançarino trabalha a clareza, gestos largos ou miúdos, que devem dizer tudo, mas não por um desejo indefinido de expressão, mas como a resposta que encaixa na beleza de uma pergunta. É uma dúvida, mas ao mesmo tempo um comando e uma direção, ela diz – responda, mas também diz –investigue, busque. E tudo isso, mais do que ser desfocado como parte do gesto generalizante que seria chamar a resposta dele de expressão, tem, na verdade, a ver com escolhas, com afunilar o possível até encontrar o próprio, mais do que o apropriado, o preciso, o que é preciso para que seja certo, para que mais do que a beleza da pergunta, seja o assombro da resposta. E com os olhos escancarados nos dizemos baixinho – sim essa é a alegria, eu quero é dessa, já que ela pode ser assim!

Há naquela alegria, uma invenção, um jogo novo, pois, é claro que não há um mundo de idéias em que a forma eterna da alegria esta protegida das sombras da realidade, não é nada disso! A alegria vai sendo inventada por todos que foram e serão alegres um dia, por velhos e novos motivos. Aquela alegria é uma alegria corpo, uma alegria para músculos e música, e só é imensa porque é dele, e amplia o campo da dança e da alegria por ser uma alegria-dança. Portanto, o que ele trabalha com uma capacidade de síntese e precisão absurdas é na transformação dessa idéia ou desse sentimento em forma, em estrutura, em cadência, ritmo, e esses passos que parecem tão fáceis e intuitivos só o são, graças a muito trabalho.

E para responder a pergunta da alegria é preciso tornar o corpo leve e os olhos altos, os passos largos como saltos tolos, tem que ser uma alegria plena de orgulho, de quem encontra um lugar para si no mundo e cabe nele sem quinas ou apertos, é alegria de quem não perdeu a infância e carrega o menino que é si mesmo no colo, coisa de neto gaiato, da bobeira boa que só uma alma quente é capaz de sentir. Há que se ter ginga, ter a inteligência de um Romário, ser um pouco leviano, muita preocupação vira âncora e joga pro chão. Não! Tem que ser uma alegria que tenha cara de carnaval, tenha brincadeira e deboche, de inicio das férias, de quem corre para mergulhar no mar, de quem acaba de beijar na boca depois de despedir no portão quando ainda não se sabe trepar e aquele beijo é tudo o que se conhece sobre amar alguém. Alegria de ter um filho. De vê-la saindo do portão no aeroporto, de quando a saudade acaba porque já chegou a hora de estar perto. Claro que isso tudo sou eu brincando com texto por não saber brincar com os braços, com as pernas e com o corpo. Tentando dar alegria ao texto, ou inventando dele uma alegria minha.

Mas o ponto é: – dá para trocar tanta imaginação e brincadeira, tantas decisões que só se tornam resultados, quando o corpo se prepara para ser tão imediato, forte e veloz quanto o estalo de uma idéia, – por chamar tudo isso de expressão? Ah não! A preguiça é inimiga da invenção. E chega de preguiça, pois se foi possível haver Pina, não há tempo a perder!

O grande Emmanuel Nassar postou hoje em sua página no Facebook o maravilhoso relato abaixo.  Emmanuel é incansável artista 24h por dia, mas deu uma pausa na confecção de suas novas armadilhas/traps (veja aqui algumas) para revirar o baú de lembranças e dividir com sua numerosa audiência online a saga que o levou a construir um dos mais belos trabalhos da história da arte brasileira recente. Eu gosto de vida cheia de estórias ricas e intensas (a vida vazia tem cheiro de plástico e morte). Eu tenho a sorte de ouvir, acompanhar e dividir estórias de vida e arte com Emmanuel há anos. Segue o texto de EN e as imagens q ele colou no post.

1998/ Bandeiras/ MAM SP/ Bienal SP

A estória de como fiz “Bandeiras”, começa em 1993, numa viagem à Alemanha. Eu acabara de montar minha participação na Bienal de Veneza e estava viajando à passeio.

Saí de Veneza, parando em Florença, Basel até Colônia, onde fui hospede do fotógrafo e editor Dietmar Schneider.

Dietmar fora um dos curadores da exposição “Brasil Já”, em 89, reunindo dez brasileiros numa grande exposição de pintura, em três museus alemães.

Devo agradecer ao incansável Dietmar, a forte impressão que uma das visitas guiadas por ele, me causou, dando inicio ao longo, e as vezes tortuoso caminho que me levou à instalação “Bandeiras”, quase cinco anos depois, no Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, em 1998, sua primeira versão.

A exposição que tanto me impressionou, estava num museu de arte contemporânea, em Bonn, mas tinha caráter antropológico. Eram 80 bandeiras de Gana, na Africa, acompanhadas de muitos textos, que informavam sobre sua história, simbologia e procedência.

O que me impressionara nas bandeiras, naquele museu em Bonn, era a oportunidade de através delas, poder colher como num flagrante, o assombroso encontro entre as duas culturas. Com que precisão se tinha alí uma síntese das relações Europa-Africa. Em vermelhos, pretos, amarelos e verdes. Em desenhos de leões, girafas, flor de liz, ramos de trigo, castelos medievais, lanças, espadas, paisagem africana. Precária costura, à golpes de linha e panos coloridos.

Foi com os olhos nessas relações que vi as bandeiras dos municípios do Pará e quis fazer algo que pudesse repetir a síntese que havia me encantado. Desta feita reproduzindo o encontro entre a herança portuguesa (europeia) e uma realidade local, de um pedaço de Brasil.

Esboçei numerosos projetos. Com mastros em evolução, com bandeiras dobradas em caixas de acrílico transparente, em amontoado delas, em varal, em círculos, em ambientes fechados, abertos, enfim, toda espécie de maneirismos contemporâneos.

Em abril de 1997, mais de um ano antes da mostra no Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, o jornal O Liberal, de Belém, publicava a primeira e ampla notícia da exposição. E eu ainda falava em usar caixas de acrílico, “onde apenas um detalhe seria mostrado”, falava também em “hastear” algumas bandeiras.

O conceito, no entanto era bastante claro dois parágrafos adiante: “como se trata de uma obra de arte, não serão identificadas”. Identifica-las “significaria dar à mostra um carater antropológico e didático. A informação de que se tratam de bandeiras dos municípios paraenses, “será amplamente divulgada na forma de entrevistas”, expliquei.

Eu não dormiria por muitas e muitas noites, em dúvidas. Dúvidas que começaram a se transformar em verdadeiros pesadelos quando começei a experimentar a dificuldade em obter as bandeiras. Essa parte da estória, é uma verdadeira aventura.

Foram quatorze meses de uma verdadeira campanha. Talvez uma campanha política. Onde não faltaram viagens pelo interior do Pará, chás de cadeira, por gabinetes de políticos, peixe frito, cerveja, boas amizades, anuncio em jornal, demorados e entusiasmados comprimentos de populares, pelas ruas de Belém.

O apoio do jornal O Liberal, foi decisivo para arrecadar as bandeiras. Publicaram anuncio criado por mim, por quase dois meses convocando a população a contribuir no trabalho de reunir as bandeiras.

Secretario do município de Monte Alegre me ligou preocupado porque havia enviado bandeira e ainda constava na lista do anuncio como ausente. Tentei tranqüiliza-lo, por conta da demora de seus intermediários chegarem a mim. Mas ele insistiu em mandar outra bandeira diretamente, “porque a população está nos pressionando.”

Num domingo, as 8 da manhã, atendi a porta de minha casa um senhor de uns 75 anos, cabelos brancos, com um embrulho nas mãos. Viajara 150kms, de Marapanim a Belém para me trazer a bandeira de seu município. Ele próprio, aos 14 anos havia desenhado a bandeira, vencendo um concurso escolar para eleger a bandeira do município.

De qualquer modo, as duvidas a respeito de como tratar as bandeiras foram se dissipando. Elas seriam mostradas como uma única obra: a grande colcha de retalhos. Justapostas, do chão ao teto, por todo o espaço da exposição. Na Sala Paulo Figueiredo, no Museu de Arte de São Paulo. O espectador seria envolvido, numa grande caixa colorida.

Eu buscava uma dissolução das individualidades simbólicas. Com o objetivo de transforma-las numa só obra, num mural pop, extraido das entranhas do Brasil, do Pará, de mim mesmo. Tranquilizei-me ao assumir a apropriação do material. Como um painel, uma coleção, uma colcha de retalhos. Sem discursos. E assim aconteçeu.

Emmanuel Nassar, fevereiro 2014

Peguei lá no site da Americas Society.

Image credit: Carlos Cruz-Diez. Los diablos de Yare, San Francisco de Yare, estado de Miranda, Venezuela, 1951. Image courtesy of the artist.

February 4 – March 22, 2014

Curated by Gabriela Rangel and assisted by Christina De León

Venezuelan-born, Paris-based artist Carlos Cruz-Diez’s longstanding research in color has won him an international reputation as one of the most important figures of Latin American modernism. The Fisicromías series (1959), two-dimensional abstract works organized through a chromatic scheme, consolidated an innovative trajectory, which lead him to de-materialize color by the end of 1960s. Furthermore, Cruz-Diez’s analysis of the transformative possibilities of color is deeply rooted in his particular interest in mechanical reproduction, as is evident in his study of the technical processes of the Polaroid photograph, film, and black-and-white photography. In many interviews, the artist has affirmed his creative debt to photography as a substantial source for helping him elaborate a discourse in the field of visual arts.

Cruz-Diez’s empirical exploration of photography is further grounded on social preoccupations the artist developed in the 1940s, when he became aware of the rapid demographic and economic transformations caused by modernization in his native Venezuela. Since then, he has documented everyday life rituals linked to the vernacular, such as local folklore festivities in rural communities and the viral emergence of shantytowns in Caracas. He has portrayed important intellectual figures linked to popular culture and music who were key interlocutors for him and his generation. Cruz-Diez’s interest on local popular culture through photography also laid a foundation for a number of realist paintings that conveyed social concerns he later redefined with the use of color as a participatory element.

In 2008, the Americas Society organized the artist’s first exhibition Carlos Cruz-Diez: (In)Formed by Color to focus on the artist’s chromatic research. Within the Light Trap, Cruz-Diez in Black and White is an exhibition that gathers a condensed body of photography made by the artist since the 1940s, bringing an important yet little known chapter of his practice to the New York audience. The exhibition also includes paintings that reflect Cruz-Diez’s early approach to realism nurtured by political and aesthetic debates undertaken by Venezuelan artists after the Second World War.

Deu no NYT domingo passado o texto abaixo e eu peguei lá no site deles agora.

WHEN I was walking to work one day last summer, I noticed that Crab Man Mike was gone from his usual post at 125th Street and Fifth Avenue. Mike has been cooking shellfish in his special pot on the streets of Harlem for 23 years. Concerned, I began asking the other street vendors where he went. Johnny Portland, one of the Jamaican guys who also sets up some days at 125th and Fifth, told me Crab Mike had moved.

I found him a few blocks farther uptown — 132nd Street and Seventh Avenue, where he had set up his pot in front of Doug E.’s Fresh Chicken and Waffles. He was serving up shellfish to his neighbors and friends. When I asked him why he switched locations, he told me it was because he could no longer recognize his customers at 125th and Fifth. There were too many crowds, too many new faces and businesses. He may have made more sales there, but on this quieter corner he felt more comfortable. The people he served here were people he had known for years. He knew their families, their troubles, their joys.

Patrons enjoying live music at Paris Blues, a bar that opened over 40 years ago on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and West 121st Street. Byron Smith for The New York Times

This is what was more important to him as a cook — being a part of his customers’ lives. I was struck by this decision. To me it resonated with one of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned from living in Harlem for the last 10 years and operating a restaurant here — Red Rooster Harlem — for three: a culture of hospitality.

When I first started coming to Harlem, it was the late 1990s. I had just moved to New York from France to work at Aquavit, and I had the typical nomadic life of the recent New York transplant. I lived with multiple roommates and moved every few months, searching for a foothold and a place that felt like home. I lived in the East Village and then Hell’s Kitchen, neither too far from the restaurant, where I worked long shifts. When I needed to unwind after work, I always found myself taking the subway uptown.

I’d take a corner seat at Sylvia’s. Also, the lounge annex of Sylvia’s restaurant, where the chef Melba Wilson worked at the time. “Hi, Sugar,” she would say when she walked up to my table. After a long day running a three-star kitchen where we served from the left, cleared from the right, and could make or break our careers on how we julienned vegetables, I found her warmth disarming. I would order a beer, listen to jazz, hip-hop and poetry — and relax.

For so long Harlem had just been an idea to me, found in books and music when growing up in Sweden and then working in France. It was Langston Hughes and Miles Davis, the Apollo and the Y, and Malcolm X sitting in a dark corner of Small’s Paradise. It was the center of black culture, the center of cool, a place so remote to me in Europe that I could hardly imagine it. Now I was here, feeling it.

Those nights were some of the first times in my life when I wasn’t a minority in the room. I’d eat a dinner of soul food at Miss Mamie’s Spoonbread Too, where Norma Jean Darden cooked her mother’s recipes, and then wander the neighborhood. I’d browse the old bookshops and street vendors, surrounded by people from all over the world: Ghana and Senegal, Jamaica and Puerto Rico. Students marched for equal rights, civil-rights activists passed out leaflets, and old native Harlemites fund-raised for churches and schools. There were hardships on the street, poverty and violence at times, but everyone had flair, style and pride. I found movement in the hustle on 125th Street — a sense of excitement and possibility.

Everywhere I went in Harlem I felt welcome. I began to recognize a kind of hospitality that I hadn’t known before and that I hadn’t found in fine dining. In the Michelin restaurants in France where I trained early in my career, I was taught excellence in ingredients, presentation and manners. But I wasn’t taught the joy and magic I felt walking into the bars and soul food joints in Harlem.

It’s this feeling that I most want to convey when asked about Harlem now. Business isn’t just about food and drink, it’s about restoring and sustaining a community that is changing quickly. In the local bars, like Paris Blues, my favorite jazz haunt, there are often crockpots of free food set up in the corner for anyone who’s hungry. At Just Lorraine’s Place on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, near 132nd Street, under a dusty portrait of Thelonious Monk, a poster announces the celebration of a woman’s birthday, with well wishes scrawled in marker next to her portrait. When I stopped by A Touch of Dee on Lenox Avenue at 143rd Street last November, a sign let me know that Corinne was serving that night and a poster announced that Mrs. Dee herself would host a free Thanksgiving dinner. At Showmans Jazz Club, there’s never a cover to hear incredible jazz and R&B, and appetizers and snacks are often free at the bar. These are the places I go to relax, where I can leave my busy life at the door and speak to my neighbors for a while.

RIGHT now, Harlem is on the verge. Since 2010, there’s been a restaurant boom. Dick Parsons has opened The Cecil in the ground floor of the old Cecil Hotel. The Grange on Amsterdam Avenue at 141st Street features signature cocktails and seasonal local produce on its menu. Bier International, a beer garden with a brilliantly curated range of brews, and the speakeasy 67 Orange have become popular nightspots.

To a community with 19 percent unemployment, these places bring hundreds of jobs that can’t be outsourced. They don’t just offer cooking and serving positions, but jobs for artists and musicians, lighting and sound engineers, handymen and electricians. Now people are coming uptown for a night out.

I travel all over the world for work and I am constantly asked to define Harlem. What’s it like, people ask. Is it cool? Is it safe? When I go to places like the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to speak among celebrated thinkers and leaders, I’m often asked: Is Harlem good now? I always have to pause before answering. Good compared with what? To when? These questions all miss the mark. Is Harlem good now? That is a question loaded with long-held ideas about race and class, one that dismisses the complex, vital history of this neighborhood and its people, their contributions to civil rights and art, under one word: “bad.”

Good or bad doesn’t begin to describe this neighborhood I love. The beauty of Harlem is that it isn’t definable as one thing or another. It has always been a place for the strivers: immigrants of all races and nationalities, artists and musicians and entrepreneurs. People have sought refuge here and have felt the need to seek refuge from here. It’s been brought to its knees by poverty and drugs and unemployment and has been pulled up by its art, its music, its food and its people.

After talking to Crab Man Mike that day on the street, I invited him to host a summer crab fest as guest chef at Red Rooster. Like any great chef, he brought his own equipment — his magic pot — and he cooked up delicious fresh crabs and clams from the Hunts Point Market, seasoned with his secret spice blend. It was one of the most memorable nights we’ve had at the Rooster. Living and working here and walking these streets, I have learned a new sense of hospitality from Harlem. It’s the feeling that lets me know I’m home.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on February 16, 2014, on page SR9 of the New York edition with the headline: Is Harlem ‘Good’ Now?

A convite do curador Daniel Rangel estou partcipando da 7ª Bienal de São Tomé que termina no próximo dia 28 de fevereiro com o vídeo Plano Acaso de 2009.

Plano Acaso from Raul Mourão on Vimeo.

No dia 22 de fevereiro deste ano, o Abre Alas apresenta sua 10º edição e completará 10 anos de existência.

Ao final do primeiro ano de vida da galeria, Marcio Botner, Laura Lima e Ernesto Neto perceberam que tinham um tesouro em mãos: cerca de 200 portfólios recebidos de artistas de todo o Brasil. Com isto, os diretores da A GENTIL CARIOCA, decidiram que iriam aproveitar todo esse material em uma exposição que acontece desde 2005 – próxima ao carnaval.

O nome “Abre Alas” remete ao carro que inaugura o desfile das escolas de Samba. O projeto é uma exposição que nasceu com o intuito de abrir espaço para jovens artistas. Com o tempo, a exposição passou a incluir a participação de artistas do mundo todo.

A GENTIL funciona como uma vitrine, e se alegra ao ver que os artistas apresentados no projeto seguem seu caminho fazendo parte dessa rede maior.

Mais de 100 novos nomes participaram do projeto ao longo destes anos. Entre eles: Maria Nepomuceno, Guga Ferraz, Rodrigo Torres e Maria Laet.

Desde 2010 convidamos curadores para realizar a seleção dos trabalhos. Este ano fizeram parte do comitê de seleção: Armando Mattos (curador da Bienal de Arte Contemporânea de Búzios – BAB) e Marta Mestre (curadora assistente no MAM – Rio).

Foram 283 inscrições e 28 projetos de artistas selecionados, de diversas regiões do Brasil e países estrangeiros.

No dia 22 de fevereiro além a abertura de exposições nos dois espaços da galeria, na Rua Gonçalves Lêdo, 17 e no prédio novo no numero 11. haverá também apresentação de Siri + William Tocalino, iniciando o projeto Lastro/Cabo Verde com curadoria de Beatriz Lemos e o Gentil lançamento do livro GAZETAS ESPORTIVAS de Alex Hamburger.

Artistas Abre Alas 10: Beatriz Nogueira, Betelhem Makonnen, Bruno Osório, Carolina Cordeiro, Cauê Novaes, Coletivo Plástico Preto, Daniel Albuquerque, Deolinda Aguiar, Eduardo Montelli, Erika Romaniuk, Evandro Prado, Felipe Braga, Fernanda Taddei, Guilherme Callegari, Jeferson Andrade, Leandra Espírito Santo, Letícia Lampert, Louise Botkay, Noara Quintana, Peter Wüthrich, Raquel Uendi, Renan Marcondes, Sheila Ortega, Steffania Paola, Stephanie Gervais, Thiago Araújo, Victor Saverio e Yana Tamayo

CAMISA EDUCAÇÃO

A GENTIL CARIOCA realiza o projeto Camisa Educação desde 2005. A cada nova inauguração na galeria convidamos um artista a realizar um projeto para uma camisa na qual a palavra “educação” está escrita. Nesta edição haverá o lançamento da Camisa Educação n°53 do artista Rafael Adorjan.

PAREDE GENTIL

No projeto Parede Gentil, um artista é convidado para fazer algo especial sobre nossa parede exterior, para que permaneça lá por 4 meses. Para CHUVAVERÃO do OPAVIVARA!, cinco chuveiros foram instalados na parede externa da galeria, convidamos Frances Reynolds para apoiar o projeto, tudo isso visando fortalecer a importância do colecionismo e tornar a coleção de arte em algo público, uma oportunidade de educar. Uma boa coleção de arte legitima seu tempo e permite que um grupo de pessoas receba esse tipo de informação.

Haverá a participação especyal do VIEMOS DO EGYTO abrindo as pyrâmides! Venham com trajes de banho! Sabão com purpuryna pra sair do chuvaverão brilhando!

ABRE ALAS 10

Abertura 22 de fevereiro de 2014 18h às 22h

Exposição de 25 de fevereiro a 15 de março de 2014

Camisa-Educação n°53 por Rafael Adorjan.

Parede Gentil n°21 por OPAVIVARÁ! de 22 de fevereiro a 28 de junho 2014

Gentil apoio Frances Reynolds

A GENTIL CARIOCA

Rua Gonçalves Ledo,11 e 17,Sobrado, Centro

Rio de Janeiro- 20060-020

Tel: 21 2508-7265 e 21 2222-1651

Abrimos de terça a sexta-feira das 12h às 19h e sábados das 12h às 17h.

correio@agentilcarioca.com.br

Saiu no NYT esse artigo do PHILIP GEFTER onde a camarada Lucia Koch (AKA Dj Surpresinha) é citada.

The Next Big Picture

With Cameras Optional, New Directions in Photography

At first glance, viewers of “What Is a Photograph?” opening on Jan. 31 at the International Center of Photography, will not even recognize the work on the wall as photographic. There is no easily identifiable subject, no clear representational form.

“The show does not answer the question,” said Carol Squiers, the show’s curator. “It poses the question. It is an open question, and that’s why I find this period in photography so exciting.”

Ms. Squiers pointed to Travess Smalley, who cuts shapes from magazine pages and colored paper and composes them into photo collages directly on a scanner. He considers the scan the negative for the print. “He doesn’t necessarily call the result a ‘photograph,’ “ she said, but she wasn’t ready to define exactly what it was.

Photography is vastly different in these early years of the 21st century, no longer the result of light exposed to film, nor necessarily lens based. As digital technology has all but replaced the chemical process, photography is now an increasingly shape-shifting medium: The iPhone, the scanner and Photoshop are yielding a daunting range of imagery, and artists mining these new technologies are making documentation of the actual world seem virtually obsolete.

“Practices have changed,” said Quentin Bajac, the Museum of Modern Art’s new chief curator of photography, one of four curators at major institutions who spoke of the opportunities and obstacles of their jobs at this pivotal moment — photography’s identity crisis.

The shift of focus from fact to fiction, and all the gradations in between, is perhaps the largest issue in the current soul-searching underway in photography circles. Questions swirl: Can the “captured” image (taken on the street — think of the documentary work of Henri Cartier-Bresson) maintain equal footing with the “constructed” image (made in the studio or on the computer, often with ideological intention)?

Museums, for their part, are debating whether photography should remain an autonomous medium or be incorporated into a mash-up of disciplines in contemporary art. And photography curators, too, are questioning the quality and validity of new practices, as the ever-morphing ubiquity of social media challenges the singularity of the photographic image.

“The biggest problem facing curators and historians of photography,” Mr. Bajac said, “is the overflow of images.”

MoMA, the first museum to create an autonomous department of photography, in 1940, perpetuated the idea that documentation of the actual world as in the work of Eugène Atget, Walker Evans and Robert Frank was the backbone of photographic art making. Mr. Bajac’s predecessors — Beaumont Newhall, Edward Steichen, John Szarkowski and Peter Galassi — presided over the field from what critics have, at times disparagingly, called “the judgment seat.” Mr. Bajac acknowledges a definite change in that paradigm.

“Today, MoMA is only one of the judgment seats,” Mr. Bajac said. “We’re writing one history of photography, while other people or institutions are writing simultaneous histories.”

Asked why he thought he was offered the job at MoMA, Mr. Bajac, impeccable and youthful at 48, surmised that “someone who is not American, who is not linked or connected to that long history of photography, is more appropriate now.” He arrived at the museum from Paris, where he had been chief curator of photography at the Pompidou Center and before that at the Musée d’Orsay.

In his inaugural exhibition, “A World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio,” which opens on Feb. 8, the focus is on the practice in the photographer’s studio as opposed to the aesthetics of the print, a clear shift in emphasis from museum canon. The works on view, drawn from MoMA’s archives and arranged thematically, include 19th-century and contemporary material, and film and video.

This idea of the studio as both a laboratory and playground is exemplified by Charles Ray’s diptych, “Plank Piece I-II” (1973), showing the artist pinned to the studio wall, in two different ways, by a large wooden plank — a conceptual performance for the camera.

A 2008 work by Walead Beshty of Los Angeles, who creates photograms — cameraless pieces — by exposing photographic paper to colored lights, verges on pure abstraction. Mr. Bajac said he was among the younger generation of artists in the recent New Photography series at MoMA whose “practices are entirely studio-based.”

Many works in the show are by international artists like Constantin Brancusi, who considered his studio as much a photographic subject as his sculpture. Another such artist is Geta Bratescu of Romania, who lived in her Bucharest studio in the 1970s, during the Communist regime of Nicolae Ceausesu, and made a 17-minute film, “L’atelier” (“The Studio,” 1978) acquired by Mr. Bajac for MoMA, signaling the recognition of video in a photographic context.

“For Bratescu, of course, the studio was a place of open expression,” the curator said, an escape from the pressure to create propagandist art glorifying Ceausescu.

Mr. Bajac also explores the studio backdrop, an artifice that divorces the subject from context — “The model or subject becomes a kind of specimen in scientific terms,” he said — and the use of props and costumes for portraiture, from the draped curtain behind an Auguste Belloc nude in the 1850s to Cindy Sherman disguises in 1983.

“Taking people away from their natural circumstances and putting them into the studio in front of a camera did not simply isolate them, it transformed them,” Irving Penn said, in a quotation on the gallery wall.

Matthew Witkovsky, the curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, echoed a growing consensus among curators that, today, the field is more pluralistic. “One wants not a judgment seat,” he argued, “but strong judgment.”

In the past, the role of the curator required tireless advocacy for the medium’s legitimacy. Christopher McCall, the 38-year-old director of Pier 24, a museum-caliber private photography center in San Francisco with roughly twice the gallery space for photography as MoMA, sees that battle as ancient history.

“For myself and my generation, whether photography is art has never even been the question,” he says.

Today, the job calls for distinguishing serious photographic art making within the vast, visual cacophony of image making. What criteria are to be applied to what is called a “photograph” when digital technology has revolutionized where, how and how often pictures are viewed?

The wall-size photographic print was already the rage in Chelsea galleries at the turn of the century (the 21st, that is), as digital files replaced the film negative. Thanks to scanners that can read imagery with optical fidelity, the evolution from chemical process to digital is nearly complete.

Yet several works in “A Sense of Place,” at Pier 24 through May 1, pose more questions than answers. Eric William Carroll’s large diazotype prints — a process used for architectural blueprints — fill the gallery with blue-tinted shadows that resemble leaves, evoking a walk in the forest. For “24 HRS in Photos,” Erik Kessels downloaded and printed every photo uploaded to Flickr in 24 hours; an avalanche of images tumbles down — wedding photos, selfies and “sexties” — the democratization of art made tangible, and threatening.

Lucia Koch, a Brazilian artist, registers a welcome degree of wit in her digital exploration of perceptual, as opposed to technical, anomaly: Her photograph appears to be a sun-filled hallway; in fact, it is the interior of a spaghetti box with two cellophane windows.

At the International Center for Photography, Ms. Squiers asked the essential question that permeates the field: What even constitutes a photograph?

While younger artists are incorporating chemical processes into their experiments with digital techniques, many “are still finding this need to make an object,” Ms. Squiers said.

An example is Marco Breuer, who has several works on display with no visible relationship to photographic imagery. His work “Spin” consists of fine concentric circles scratched and embossed on chromogenic paper. The camera-less process still requires emulsion and developer, but the result is a one-of-a-kind handmade object.

Ms. Squiers also included the work of Christopher Williams, whose photographs compose an inventory of increasingly obsolescent film-based equipment — cameras, lenses and darkroom gear — as beautiful and precise as catalog product shots. The accompanying text adds detail about how the equipment was used. Such scrutiny suggests, with elegiac clarity, the end of the chemical era in photography.

Mr. Witkovsky, at the Art Institute of Chicago, is giving Mr. Williams his first museum retrospective, beginning this month, in a traveling show, “The Production Line of Happiness.”

“This is a fully arrived ‘history of art’ in photography,” Mr. Witkovsky said of the work by Mr. Williams, who applies an art historian’s scrutiny to the social and historical implications of the medium in the mid-20th century.

Mr. McCall, of Pier 24, acknowledged that a curatorial consensus on the photography’s future has not been reached. “There has to be some photographic process involved, some piece of technology that we acknowledge as photographic, but I don’t think it means it has to be lens-based,” he said. (But don’t feel bad for the auteurs of representational photography in the digital age: Shown at Pier 24 are also Thomas Demand, Andreas Gursky and Paul Graham — whose photographic documentation of the “authentic” moment continues a stalwart tradition.)

Mr. McCall dismissed the notion that experimentation with unconventional processes or the overabundance of images poses any threat to contemporary photography. “It’s a benefit,” he said, encouraging curators “to analyze and think about images because they’re everywhere.”

Trying to define what a photograph is today situates the curator at a new frontier, Ms. Squiers suggested. While it’s unclear where the medium is headed, she is certain that contemporary photographers are doing something that is disorienting yet ultimately transformative.

“You feel like the cord to the mother ship has been cut,” she said, “and now you’re floating in space.”

Terminou agora no dia 18 de janeiro a exposição de fotos maravilhosas e banais de Thomas Demand na galeria Matthew Marks da 22nd street em NY. Segue o link do site e o Press Release.

Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Thomas Demand: Dailies, the next exhibition in his gallery at 526 West 22nd Street. The artist’s second one-person exhibition at the gallery will feature a new series of eighteen dye-transfer photographs.

In contrast to his usual practice of depicting scenes that are typically culled from news media, Demand created the Dailies by sourcing his personal cell phone photographs. The commonplace scenes portray anonymous, everyday moments, like a cup placed in a chain-link fence, or a plant seen behind a frosted glass window. For the first time, Demand has printed these photographs using the dye-transfer process – a printing method known for its labor-intensity and its richness.

Thomas Demand’s work has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2005), the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2009), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2012). He represented Germany at the Venice Biennale (2003) and the Bienal de São Paulo (2004), and curated the critically acclaimed exhibition La Carte d’Après Nature, which premiered at the National Museum of Monaco and traveled to Matthew Marks Gallery in 2011.

Thomas Demand: Dailies will be on view at 526 West 22nd Street, from November 1 through January 18, 2014, Tuesday through Saturday, 11:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M.

For additional information, please contact Adrian Rosenfeld at (212) 243-0200, or email adrian@matthewmarks.com.

Saiu na edição impressa da The Economists, de 18 de janeiro 2014 e eu peguei lá no site.

The rapid growth of art fairs is changing the way galleries operate

SHORTLY after The Economist went to press, about 25,000 people were expected to turn up at the London Art Fair. Your correspondent visited just before, as 128 white booths were being filled with modern paintings and sculptures. Dealers clutched mobile phones to their ears or gathered in small groups. They seemed nervous—as well they might be. “I can earn a year’s living in one fair,” said one harried dealer while stringing up a set of lights.

Before 1999 London had just one regular contemporary art fair, remembers Will Ramsay, boss of the expanding Affordable Art Fair. This year around 20 will be held in Britain, mostly in the capital. Roughly 90 will take place worldwide. The success of larger events such as Frieze, which started in London, has stimulated the growth of smaller fairs specialising in craft work, ceramics and other things. Art14, which started last year, specialises in less well-known international galleries, showing art from Sub-Saharan Africa, South Korea and Hong Kong.

One explanation for the boom is the overall growth of the modern-art market. Four-fifths of all art sold at auction worldwide last year was from the 20th or 21st century, according to Artprice, a database. In November an auction in New York of modern and contemporary art made $691m (£422m), easily breaking the previous record. As older art becomes harder to buy—much of it is locked up in museums—demand for recent works is rising.

London’s art market in particular has been boosted by an influx of rich immigrants from Russia, China and the Middle East. “When I started 23 years ago I had not a single non-Western foreign buyer,” says Kenny Schachter, an art dealer. “It’s a different world now.” And London’s new rich buy art differently. They often spend little time in the capital and do not know it well. Traipsing around individual galleries is inconvenient, particularly as galleries have moved out of central London. The mall-like set-up of a fair is much more suitable.

Commercial galleries used to rely on regular visits from rich Britons seeking to furnish their stately homes. Many were family friends. The new art buyers have no such loyalty. People now visit galleries mainly to go to events and to be seen, says Alan Cristea, a gallery owner on Cork street in Mayfair. Fairs, and the parties that spring up around them, are much better places to be spotted.

Some galleries are feeling squeezed. Bernard Jacobson runs a gallery opposite Mr Cristea. The changing art market reminds him of when his father, a chemist, was eclipsed by Boots, a pharmaceutical chain, in the 1960s. Seven galleries in Cork Street relocated this month to make way for a redevelopment; five more may follow later this year.

Yet the rise of the fairs means galleries no longer require prime real estate, thinks Sarah Monk of the London Art Fair. With an international clientele, many can work online or from home. Although some art fairs still require their exhibitors to have a gallery space, increasingly these are small places outside central London or beyond the city altogether. One gallery owner says few rich customers ever visit his shop in south London. He makes all his contacts at the booths he sets up at fairs, which might be twice the size of his store. “It’s a little like fishing,” he explains. “You move to where the pike is.”

Andy Hope 1930, Amazing (Edition), 2014. Copyright Andy Hope 1930. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Curated by SANE for {TEMP} Art Space New York

Artists: Seline Baumgartner, Nancy Barton & Mike Glass, Bjoerk (One Little Indian-Elektra Records), Ella Joyce Buckley, Shadi Harouni, Andy Hope 1930, Alexa Hoyer, Jürgen Klauke, Austin Lee, Michael Mahalchick, Nadja Verena Marcin, Adam Parker Smith, Thomas Zummer

The exhibition “FEARFULAWESOME– Ecstasy, death and rebirth of a male painter” speaks to the beauty and brutality of ambiguity. At the center of the exhibition stands the surreal act of Amazing (2007-2013) by Andy Hope 1930, depicting a man in the arms of a blonde Überwoman. Simultaneously a muse, dominatrix and archetypal mother, she carries the fallen, impotent hero in a gesture echoing the Pietà. Two blue cloud-like ghosts appear in a tumultuous sky. A golden eagle looms above the scene signifying an authoritarian imprint, a reminder of history, politics, and surveillance.

The story unfolds somewhere between earth, heaven and hell. The title is written directly onto the painting, making the author an active character in this playful yet sublime narrative about love and surrender, generosity and control, forgiveness and restrain, devotion and personal limitation, heritage and future.

Amazing reveals human erring and error in its deepest sense: the silence around the irrational; the speechlessness; the adrenalin; the fear; the passion; the literal death of the author. Amazing never clarifies whether the fallen hero is dead. It’s a story devoid of resolution and a confession about the conflict of being human, forever caught in the fray between emotion and reason.

In recent series of public attacks, some of the individual’s hidden and secret obsessions have made their way into the public sphere. Secluded and unshared emotions, born from disappointment and the unhappiness of isolation, come out by both sensationalism and spectacle of media, continually fascinating and captivating the public. In the omnipresent triumph of “The Society of the Spectacle” (1967), Debord, death and violence are attached by a seductive quality, often ecstasy, evoking a sad voyeuristic curiousness as entertainment.

With “FEARFULAWESOME– Ecstasy, death and rebirth of a male painter” we would like to open the discussion about the power of emotions concerning the ambiguity and contradiction in human behavior. The disposition of body and mind becomes evident in contemporary society on many different levels. From both sublime to literal, we choose to show works that challenge the viewer to rethink his own standing as a private persona and as a public person in society.

SANE is a curatorial collective led by artists and curators who strive to inspire intrepid critical inquiry and a dynamic platform for artistic exchange and dialogue. SANE was founded by Sarah Corona, Alexa Hoyer and Nadja Verena Marcin.

Opening January 23, 2014 7-9 pm

The show will be staged at {TEMP} Art Space, 47 Walker Street, New York (btw. Broadway and Church)

Opening hours: Thursday – Saturday, 12- 7 pm, and by appointment

Closing event: February 15, 2014, 7 – 10 pm

With the live performance “Soft Horn” by Nadja Verena Marcin at 8:15 pm and live performance by Ella Joyce Buckley at 9 pm.

A CAIXA Cultural Rio de Janeiro apresenta, de 22 de janeiro a 9 de março de 2014, a instalação do artista plástico e escritor Nuno Ramos Hora da razão, composta de três grandes formas geométricas que “choram” ao som do samba homônimo de Batatinha. Formadas por estruturas de vidros assimétricas e irregulares, as três peças estarão cobertas por um elemento sólido feito de breu que escorrerá continuamente sobre as superfícies e sobre o piso da galeria, originando, literalmente, o choro negro. Dentro dessas estruturas, monitores de vídeo apresentam Rômulo Fróes, Paulo Climachauska e Nina Becker cantando a música Hora da razão. A exposição tem o patrocínio da Caixa Econômica Federal e do Governo Federal.

No entorno da instalação, estarão expostos 78 desenhos inéditos, criados a partir de folhas de ouro, prata e bronze, tinta a óleo e carvão sobre papel que compõem a série Munch. O nome se deve à utilização como elemento plástico do sobrenome do pintor norueguês Edvard Munch, que inspirou a coleção. A série também é uma homenagem do artista à sua mãe, falecida em 2012. A principal temática da instalação é a passagem do tempo e, nesse sentido, a morte ocupa um papel preponderante. Nesse processo, o artista utiliza os mais variados materiais, e estabelece uma relação densa e humana com cada um.

A essência de Nuno parece estar justamente na capacidade de trabalhar com a tensão entre os materiais. Dessa forma, o translúcido dialoga com o opaco, assim como o mole com o duro e a linha reta com a curva. Isso leva à utilização de alguns recursos plásticos como a inserção de placas de vidro em formas de madeira ou outros materiais repletos de vaselina, resultando em camadas fluidas que extravasam e se espalham pelo chão.

Sobre o artista:

Nuno Ramos nasceu em 1960, em São Paulo, onde vive e trabalha. Formou-se em Filosofia pela Universidade de São Paulo em 1982. Artista plástico, compositor, cineasta e escritor, participou de diversas exposições coletivas e individuais, destacando-se, em 2011, as individuais Solidão, palavra, Ai, pareciam eternas! e O globo da morte de tudo (em parceria com Eduardo Climachauska). Publicou em 2011 seu oitavo livro, Junco, pela editora Iluminuras, pelo qual conquistou o prêmio Portugal Telecom de Literatura na categoria poesia. Em 2008, ganhou o Prêmio Portugal Telecom na categoria melhor livro do ano com Ó, também da Iluminuras.

Abertura para convidados: 21 de janeiro, às 19h

Visitação: de 22 de janeiro a 9 de março de 2014 (de terça-feira a domingo)

Horário: das 10h às 21h

Local: CAIXA Cultural Rio de Janeiro – Galeria 4

Endereço: Av. Almirante Barroso, 25 – Centro (Metrô: Estação Carioca)

Telefone: (21) 3980-3815

Entrada Franca

Parece que há um grande rio com esse nome, tem gente que acha que o Francisco Buarque de Holanda é enorme mas pra mim Grande Chico é o sr Xico Sá que escreve pra cacete na Folha em livros e nas telinhas por aí. Esse texto aí de baixo eu peguei no blog dele e é sobre o livraço do Javier Naranjo.

O que é o amor?

“É quando uma pessoa se ama e até pode casar e ter filhos e todas essas besteiras”, responde Ana Cristina Henao, 8 anos.

O que é sexo?

“É uma pessoa que se beija em cima da outra”(Luisa Fernanda Pates, 8).

“Trabalho das putas”( Mateo Ceballos, 10).

Criança não alivia, não se suja à toa com o barro escorregadio do eufemismo na hora de definir as coisas e os sentimentos do mundo.

Criança sabe que um adulto não passa de uma “pessoa que em toda coisa que fala, vem primeiro ela”, como bem-disse Andrés Felipe Bedoya, 8.

O professor Javier Naranjo pesquisou, durante uma década, as definições de meninos e meninas entre 3 e 12 anos. Do “A” de adulto ao “V” de violência.

O trabalho foi feito na escola El Triângulo, no sítio Llanogrande, zona rural de Rionegro, estado de Antióquia, nas brenhas da Colômbia.

Naranjo reuniu a sua investigação no livro “Casa das estrelas –o universo contado pelas crianças”, publicado agora no Brasil pela editora Foz.

É meu livro de algibeira. Não largo, não me larga. Sei até de cor muitas das definições mais sacanas da molecada.

Aos 11 anos, o donzelinho Oscar Alarcón desafia Freud e diz o que é uma mulher:

“Humano que não se pode consertar.”

Antes que o pequeno Oscar seja chamado de porquinho-chauvinista fruto da cultura machista e opressora da América Latina, passamos a bola para o Héctor Auguto Oquendo, 10:

“Elas têm o poder e um homem não.”

Nelson Ramirez, de apenas 7, é um fofo desde niño:

“É uma pessoa que se apaixona por alguém”.

E você, caro leitor adulto, sabe o que seja um morto? Ora, Pedro Bó, facílimo, é só “uma pessoa que está estirada”, na resposta do geniozinho Herber David Cardona, 9.

Óbvio que solidão não passa daquilo “que dá na mamãe” (Jorge Sáenz, 6).

Bem, dinheiro “é o fruto do trabalho –mas há casos especiais”(Pepino Nates, 11). Bote casos especiais nisso.

Para encerrar, rebobinemos a definição definitiva de amor: “É quando batem em você e dói muito”, soltou a pequena Viviana Castaño, 6.

Pensando bem, faz todo sentido do mundo. Faz ou não faz? E não estou falando obrigatoriamente nas perversões do tio Nelson Rodrigues.

Joshua Callaghan, o nosso correspondente em Los Angeles JC/LA/CA (com foto e minibio aí na barra lateral), manda avisar que está inaugurando a exposição individual Soft targets na Royale Projects Contemporary Art em Palm Desert CA na próxima sexta dia 17, de 17h as 20h. Segue o convite e o release.

JOSHUA CALLAGHAN : soft targets

January 2014

royale projects : contemporary art is pleased to present Soft Targets, a solo exhibition of new works by Joshua Callaghan. In this show Callaghan presents a suite of recent charcoal rubbings of commercial signage found in greater Los Angeles. In these works, Callaghan takes banal elements of the American landscape and relocates them to the rarified walls of the gallery. These works reveal the latent poetic dimension imbedded in the disposable vernacular messages that surround us.

Hunting in the suburban expanse, often cloaked in darkness, Callaghan ascends a ladder and makes an impression of the text or imagery on wet canvas and denim. Using the found signs as a kind of printing block, he captures the pre-existing image. The result is a collection of words and symbols that form a fragmented portrait of our society. “Beauty” isolated from the Beauty Shop sign becomes a meditation on art and aesthetics; “Cash”, withdrawn from the Check Cashing stores that prey on those who need money fast, becomes a commentary on wealth and value.

The show title, “Soft Targets”, refers to the Target logo that has been incorporated into a series of these works. The charcoal technique creates an imperfect impression. These flaws convey the handmade, human quality of the rubbing process, and, perhaps, the humanity underlying the cheap, mechanical surface of the signs. Callaghan describes the process as “the opposite of street art. I hope to take something back from the suburban, big box crudscape* that characterizes the America we have built. Instead of taking art into the landscape, I am displacing the landscape, preserving it, and exposing the basic human needs that these signs embody.”

Joshua Callaghan (Doylestown,PA, 1969) has had solo exhibitions at Haas & Fischer Gallery, Zurich; Bank Gallery, Los Angeles; and Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions at venues such as L & M Arts, Los Angeles; Galleria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo; Venus Over Manhattan and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York, where Roberta Smith listed Callaghan as one of the artists “that steal the show” in her New York Times review of the exhibition. Callaghan was recently included by ArtPhaire, a contemporary art magazine curated by Park Hyatt, as one of the “10 Artists to Watch at Art Basel Miami Beach“ along side artists such as; Tracey Emin, Nan Goldin and Thomas Houseago. This is Joshua Callaghan’s first solo exhibition at royale projects : contemporary art.

* Crudscape is a term coined by James Howard Kunstler in The Geography of Nowhere, Touchstone, NY, NY, 1993.

Foi uma morte anunciada. Na manhã do dia 11 de janeiro de 2013 o corpo do artista chileno Selaron foi encontrado por volta das 7h20 da manhã na Rua Manoel Carneiro, também conhecida como Escadaria do Convento de Santa Teresa ou Escadaria Selarón. Horas antes a edição do jornal O Globo chegava as bancas com uma matéria onde o artista afirmava estar sendo ameaçado de morte.

O corpo de Selarón foi encontrado carbonizado principalmente no rosto e ombros. Ao lado do corpo, a polícia encontrou uma lata de solvente inflamável e um isqueiro. Vizinhos contaram ter ouvido gritos de um homem pedindo socorro antes de sentir um forte cheiro de queimado.

No dia seguinte à morte uma estranha tese de suicídio começou a circular nos jornais, sites e televisão e a investigação policial tomou esse rumo apesar de moradores e amigos discordarem da hipótese.

Selarón era meu vizinho, meu ateliê funciona na Rua Joaquim Silva há mais de 10 anos. Nesse periodo de convivência tivemos inúmeros encontros, tomamos dezenas de cervejas, escutei muitas histórias e fiz centenas de fotos. A maior parte das fotos são de turistas fotografando a escada mas fiz alguns retratos de Selarón inclusive dele pintando o painel da Copa de 2014 ao pé da escadaria.

Selaron azulejou com suas proprias mãos a escada onde morava e trabalhava, sem lei Rouanet, sem captadores de recursos profissionais, sem produtores, sem patrocinio publico ou privado. Construiu uma obra ao longo de 215 degraus e 125 metros sem apoio oficial mas teve a colaboração de sua audiencia, ao longo dos anos centenas de pessoas enviaram azulejos de suas cidades. Uma obra colaborativa, interativa e em permenente processo. Selaron criou de uma tacada só uma gigantesca obre de arte publica, um marco urbanistico e um ponto turistico. Um novo ponto turistico numa cidade repleta de pontos turisticos. Sua intenção era clara, ao azulejar sua rua desejava que esse gesto reverberasse pela região na forma de outras melhorias. Infelizmente isso nunca aconteceu.

Sábado fez um ano que Selaron morreu. Alguém aí tem alguma informação sobre os rumos da investigação policial???

“life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

-Soren Kierkegaard

“A philosophy that does not include the possibility of soothsaying from coffee grounds is not a true philosophy.”

-Walter Benjamin

On 9 January 2014, Mary Boone Gallery will open at its Fifth Avenue location an exhibition of new works by G.T. PELLIZZI.

G.T. Pellizzi’s new series of works is inspired by graphs sourced from financial publications as well as hexagrams from the I Ching. Both are images of analytic tools used for purposes of divination. They are tied to people’s desire to predict possible futures in order to achieve the most positive outcomes. Formally, the works look like a collection of virtual graphs and diagrams translated into some of the vocabulary of minimalism and abstraction in the history of Contemporary Art.

Graphs are the building blocks of financial plans, urban plans, construction plans, and socio-political plans. They are used by politicians to advocate one position or another, and by investment bankers to determine transactions, but our subjective condition makes it impossible to read them impartially. The fact that we cannot read them impartially is also why we can read stories into them at all. Similarly, the I Ching must be read through a subjective context in order for the reader to be able to interpret the conduit of its composite modular signs. “snap lines”, a chalked string used in building trades to make a straight line on a vertical surface, feature prominently in this body of work. When used in construction, snap lines function as a mark and an organizing principle that ultimately dissolves behind the final image or structure. They are the catalytic gesture marking the beginning of a construction, the translation of an abstract plan, when it only exists as a mark or a drawing, into a physical space. Their presence in these works can be read as intimations of possible future developments, by design and by chance.

IANDOMENICO TONATIUH PELLIZZI

G.T. Pellizzi was born in 1978 in Tlayacapan, Mexico. He studied philosophy at St. Johns College and graduated from The Channin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union. From 2001-2011, Pellizzi co-founded and has been involved in various art collectives, including The Bruce High Quality Foundation, with whom he has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of Art, PS1 MoMA, Centre Pompidou, PAC Murcia, and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and various art galleries in New York, Zurich, Berlin and London. In the past year he has participated in exhibitions at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Museo del Barrio in New York, the Biennial of the Americas in Denver, and at L&M Gallery in Los Angeles. Pellizzi lives between New York and Mexico.

The exhibition, at 745 Fifth Avenue, will run through 1 March 2014.

For additional information, please contact Ron Warren at the Gallery, or visit our website www.maryboonegallery.com.

publicado no site do Globo as 15h25 do dia 30/12/13

fotografia de Leonardo Aversa

Um dos idealizadores da Petite Galerie, ele lutava contra um câncer

RIO – Morreu na manhã desta segunda-feira aos 90 anos o marchand Franco Terranova. Um dos idealizadores da Petite Galerie, que funcionou entre 1954 a 1988 em Ipanema, foi um do precursores no mercado de arte brasileiro. Pela galeria passaram artistas como Carlos Vergara, Ernesto Neto, Volpi, Luiz Áquila, entre outros. Ele lutava havia dois meses contra um câncer.

Quando chegou ao Brasil vindo da Itália, em 1947, o estudante de literatura e poeta Franco Terranova tinha experiência como aviador, tendo atuado em batalhas da Segunda Guerra Mundial. Deixou o país pelo qual lutou, bradando que se recusava a viver numa Itália comandada por Mussolini — e já encantado com o personagem de Zé Carioca, que o fez pegar um navio rumo ao Brasil.

Chegou aqui sem dinheiro, primeiro ao Paraná e a São Paulo e, em seguida, ao Rio. Na cidade em que se consagraria como um dos grandes nomes das artes visuais, Terranova dormiu uma ou outra noite na praia até ser abrigado pela família Matarazzo, com quem tinha parentesco. O imigrante conseguiu emprego na Petite Galerie, a diminuta casa inaugurada em 1953, em Copacabana, pelo pintor Mario Agostinelli (1915-2000).

Um ano depois, Terranova já era um dos sócios da galeria de arte que, por suas mãos, seria convertida num dos principais pontos de encontro de artistas na década de 1960. Em 1954, a casa migrou para o endereço em que fez história (na Praça General Osório, 53, em Ipanema).

Lá, Terranova expôs, nos anos 1950, José Pancetti e Alfredo Volpi, e, na década seguinte, Carlos Vergara e Antonio Dias. Nos anos 1970, chegou a ter uma filial em São Paulo, mas era o Rio que ganhava força como espaço de vanguardas artísticas. Mais tarde, nos anos 1980, lançou artistas como Ernesto Neto e Jac Leirner.

— Lembro do dia em que ele foi ao meu ateliê pela primeira vez. Era julho de 1987, e tive um dos maiores encontros da minha vida. Mostrar meu trabalho a ele foi um dos momentos mais espirituais que vivi — lembra Ernesto Neto, que, em março de 1988, fez, na galeria de Terranova, sua primeira exposição individual. — Mesmo antes de expor lá, eu já sonhava com uma mostra na Petite. Estar na galeria em 1988 foi muito importante na minha carreira, mas, mais que isso, foi emocionante. Tenho um amor profundo por ele, um respeito enorme. Considero Franco um pai.

Emocionado, Neto conta que Terranova sonhava fazer uma exposição num navio “e sair com ela pelo mundo, navegando” (“Era um poeta, tinha uma visão ampla da vida”, diz o artista).

Casado desde o início da década de 1960 com Rossella Terranova, italiana nascida em Atenas, o galerista manteve nos fundos da Petite um espaço, o Petit Studio, em que a mulher trabalhava preparando atores para espetáculos, filmes e novelas.

Em 1988, ele decidiu fechar a galeria. Mais tarde, em entrevista ao GLOBO, disse ter deixado o ofício para as mulheres, citando nomes como os das galeristas Raquel Arnaud e Nara Roesler, ambas marchandes que atuam em São Paulo.

Um dos quatro filhos que teve com Rossella, o fotógrafo Marco Terranova conta que, desde o fechamento da Petite Galerie, o pai passou a se dedicar integralmente à poesia. Embora tenha seguido investindo em obras de arte (e ainda servindo de referência para colecionadores e artistas), deixou de ter o espaço físico da galeria.

— Ele continuou interessado em arte, mas virou poeta em tempo integral. Seguia para o computador todos os dias para escrever poemas — lembra Marco, que trabalhou ao lado do pai em “Sombras”, livro lançado pela editora Réptil em 2012.

No título também participou outra filha do galerista, a designer Paola Terranova. Para o projeto, ele convidou 72 artistas a fazerem ilustrações. Um time de artistas consagrados, como Cildo Meireles, Abraham Palatnik, Frans Krajcberg e Carlos Vergara, aceitou seu convite.

— Franco tinha visão de artista de vanguarda e também uma adesão às vanguardas. Era um poeta que a vida toda praticou poesia — disse, entre lágrimas, Vergara, que também fez sua primeira individual na Petite Galerie, em 1967. — Vivemos coisas inesquecíveis. Fiz uma exposição com Franco fechada por um general em 1968, de forma brutal, durante a ditadura. E ele docemente segurou o tranco. Foi um companheiro que sabia manter distância, não era invasivo, passava uma amorosa segurança. Foi importante no início da minha carreira e, agora, na maturidade, me deu um presente: quando abri minha exposição no Museu do Açude (em setembro passado), Franco surgiu lá, caminhando. Era um homem capaz disso: aos 90 anos, subir lá para ver minha exposição.

Como poeta, Terranova também foi prestigiado. Lançou 13 livros e é tido como um precursor da poesia concreta por Ferreira Gullar, que assinou o prefácio de “Sombras”. Em 1960, no “Jornal do Brasil”, ele publicou um poema pela primeira vez. A construção espacial se repetiria em todos os seus textos, desde o primeiro livro, “O girassol” (1973).

— Conheço Franco desde a Petite Galerie. Fomos muito amigos, ele me visitou no exílio, em Buenos Aires. Teve uma importância enorme nas artes plásticas do Brasil. Tinha o juízo crítico de um artista, o que ele também era. Não fazia só pelo dinheiro, prezava pela qualidade. Pela Petite Galerie só passavam os melhores — disse Gullar.

Ele deixa mulher, quatro filhos, duas netas e um livro no prelo, “Carma carnadura”, que será lançado pela Réptil no início de 2014. Para a obra, posou nu diante das lentes do filho Marco, a fim de registrar as marcas da velhice no corpo humano. Já seu texto trata de um homem que morre em plena vida.

lá no Artspace.

There is no doubt—Brazilian art is having its moment, not only at home but also in the United States and Europe. There are reasons for the expansive territorial takeover beyond simply the country’s booming economy. For one thing, Brazil has become a hot destination for new art fueled by Brazil’s strong gallery community, events like the ArtRio art fair and the São Paulo Biennial, and world-class draws like the ever-expanding collection at Bernardo Paz’s Inhotim, the cultural center in Minas Gerais that generates a fever pitch of excitement when it unveils its new acquisitions every year or so. Then, on a broader level, Brazil is on everyone’s mind due to the fact that it will host two major international athletic events in the next few years: the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics, both in Rio de Janeiro. The spotlight generated by all of these elements has served to cast one fact in sharp relief: Brazil, over the last century, been generating spectacularly rich art.Within the work of contemporary Brazilian artists, one can find the history of the country, spanning from 20th century modernity back to the colonial period. The language they adopt is rooted in the cultural vernacular of Brazil, overloaded by the sensory experience of the tropics, including touch and sound. It is a language unique to Brazil. The use of everyday materials has been a foundation of the country’s art since the mid-1950s and 1960s, when artists like Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticicatransformed found objects—from cloth to metal and colored glass—into spaces for colorful expressions that appeal to both the mind and the body. This aesthetic, native to the country’s art, was celebrated in Caetano Veloso’s classic 1968 song “Tropicalia,” in which he describes a monument “made of crépon paper and silver.”

• A veritable feast of exhibitions showcasing Brazilian artists has materialized in major museums around the world in recent months, most prominently the important retrospective of Mira Schendel at Tate Modern (running through January), where over 250 artworks spanning the arc of her career are on view, many for the first time. Although Schendel shared the walls of MoMA with León Ferrari four years ago, the Tate exhibition is one of the largest ever mounted of her work.
• At the same time, the Serralves Foundation in Portugal is hosting a retrospective (previously presented at the Reina Sophia in Madrid) of one of the most radical Brazilian contemporary artists, Cildo Meireles. At the core of his work are issues of territoriality and colonial history, expressed through everyday objects that the artists subversively modifies, from glass Coca-Cola bottles inscribed with text to altered dollar bills to monumental works like a tower of Babel composed of radios tuned in different stations. With Meireles’s larger installations in the show, viewers are confronted by entire rooms filled with art, engaging them to experience the work through direct participation, either by walking through it or inhabiting the space.
• At Île-de-Vassivière’s Centre International d’Art et du Paysage in France, the artistFernanda Gomes is showing works constructed with wood pieces, fabric, pieces of glass, and other found materials. Gomes does not hide anything: she works directly with the materials without any modification, thus laying bare the artistic process. What she does change are intrinsic qualities of the room in which the art is displayed, such as the lighting and wall colors, using these elements to transform the mundane objects into works of art.
• Laura Lima, working around the subject of social relations and human behavior, currently has two performance artworks at Zürich’s Migros Museum that she is directing from a distance: the artists, who lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, has dispatched actors in her stead to enact dramaturgic scenes from her hometown.
• In New York City, the Bronx Museum is presenting a retrospective of 140 artworks from the last 40 years by Brazilian artist Paulo Bruscky. Among the highlights of the exhibition are his video performances and word-based works, including mail art. Not related to the Neo-Concrete movement, Bruscky is usually affiliated with Fluxus and recognized as one of the pioneers of performance art in Brazil.
• A more easily accessible piece, in more ways than one, can be found at the 60th-street entrance of Central Park, where the Public Art Fund has commissioned a sculpture byIran do Espírito Santo that consists of a huge cube mysteriously casted in a single piece. Children and adults alike climb on it and interact with it, echoing the title of the work, Playground.
• The exaltation of Brazilian has been in evidence across New York’s galleries in recent months. In September, the New York gallery Hauser & Wirth reunited some of the most important postwar Brazilian artists in “Sensitive Geometries,” a show that laid out how a generation of unique talents reclaimed Brazil’s legacy from decades of having its culture shaped by foreign influences. The resulting modernity that permeated Brazil in the middle of the 20th century was suffused with a sensibility particular to the country, translated visually through a rhythm of geometric forms and colors.
• At Simon Preston Gallery, Jessica Mein presents a cohesive selection of wood constructions reclaimed from discarded billboards in São Paulo. The wall-based works are scanned, ripped, and cut in delicate abstractions. The resulting collages echo the Neoconcrete movement in their geometric forms. Each work is called an “obra,” which translates either as a “work of art” or a “site of construction.”
• Caetano de Almeida’s most recent colorful work at Eleven Rivington introduced circular cutouts at the core of his well-known large-scale geometric paintings and watercolors. The sinuous lines combined with round cutout shapes create harmonious movements and unexpected surprises within the flat surfaces of the canvas.
• Sandra Cinto presented “Piece of Silence” at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, an installation of a bronze flute and several white string instruments hanging on walls that were drawn with parallel lines reminiscent of musical scores. Since the entire room was painted in white—instruments included—the wall arrangements, with the instruments set against the lines, took on the appearance of minimal drawings that invited to musical reverie.
• The theme of Tatiana Blass’s exhibition at the Johannes Vogt Gallery was the dynamics of communication, recorded dialogues, and public speeches. In a series of oil paintings, one video, and two sculptures, she blurred the boarders between the speaker and the audience, the microphone and the interviewed, the camera and the interviewer.
• At Tierney Gardarin Gallery in Chelsea, Janaina Tschäpe presented “The Ghost in Between,” a 10-minute, two-channel video powerfully related to earth and nature -a journey through the Amazon river. The video is reminiscent of the 19th-century “découverte” of Brazil’s exotic tropical regions. For New Yorkers, it functions as a contemporary look on the Amazon landscape.
• Brazilian furniture designers are not left behind. The iconic Joaquim Tenreiro (1906-1992) is showing at R20th Century, while Zanini de Zanine and Isay Weinfeld are atEspasso, also in Tribeca. In the work of all three, the Brazilian style is expressed through the confluence of modern forms with the aesthetic quality of such local materials as woven cane and Brazilian hardwoods. The result stresses both the objects’ form and the lusciousness of the wood.
• Both Anton Kern Gallery in Chelsea and Tilton Gallery at the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where solo shows of Marepe and Jarbas Lopes are currently on view, position these artists as heirs of the 1960s Brazilian Neoconcrete movement. Marepe transforms such daily objects as irons, brooms, and plastic buckets into artworks by matching them with one another or changing their functionality. Among the most striking pieces are a bike turned into a large sculpture of a fish, and a column made by piling up ordinary, if colorful, plastic bowls. Lopes presents, among other works, a group of sizable canvasses featuring panels of wrapped woven elastic, appealing to the viewer’s sense of touch.
• Reinforcing the idea of the sense of touch, “Brasiliana” at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt is an exhibition that focuses on the notion of tactility. As explained by curator Martina Weinhart, the installations are charged by political and social statements and require the public’s participation, like in the work by Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida.
• This relationship between contemporary and modern Brazilian artists is the subject of “Imagine Brazil,” an exhibition currently at the Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo. The curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Gunnar B. Kvaran invited each of the young participating artists to select a “mentor” as a way to imagine and reconstruct the artistic bonds between figures of the 1950s and today. In the process, the boundary between modern and contemporary, and the past and the present, becomes blurred.
• Next February, meanwhile, Ernesto Neto will occupy the Guggenheim Bilbao with an exhibition called “The Body That Carries Me,” consisting of sculptural environments that can be penetrated, felt, and smelled, allowing for a total sensorial experience.
• In London, Adriana Varejão just closed a show at Victoria Miro Gallery where she presented a series of individual female portraits centered on issues of race. Prompted by a national poll that asked “What color is your skin?” Varejão reflects in these works on the perspective Brazilian women have of themselves with respect to their complexion and race, and on historical and racial issues derived from the country’s colonization. The work alludes to centuries of cultural and social traditions, and it summarizes not only the history of the country but also the socio-cultural engagement of contemporary Brazilian artists.