Contemporary Art Brazil

Nas boas livrarias de Ramos e também no site da Thames & Hudson.

Raul Mourão’s involvement with art goes far beyond his own practice, which encompasses sculpture, installation, drawing, video, photography and performance. He constantly seeks new platforms for engaging with audiences in the arts, be it through editing, curating, writing or opening his studio to discussion groups. Born in Rio in 1967, he studied open courses at EAV (Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage) in Rio.

Largely inspired by sports and other events in the public arena, Mourão has pursued two distinct narratives, one closer to fiction and the other more documentary in nature. In Seven Artists (1995) and Artists (2003) he hanged fellow artists with climbing equipment on the wall of exhibition spaces. By employing humour and irony as strategies, these works deal with notions of sculpture, performance and display in turn. The documentation of both happenings was later turned into videos. A similar use of humour and irony can be seen in the series Luladepelúcia (2005), which can be roughly translated as ‘Plush Lula’. Consisting of miniaturised teddy-bear reproductions of Brazil’s popular former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the piece appeared after a major corruption scandal engulfed his government. Here Mourão was confronting a sentimental image of the president with the corrupted one being propagated by the media of the time. Not surprisingly, his work was interpreted as both critical and adulatory.

The increasing presence of security grilles in Brazil beginning in the 1980s has been the starting point for many of Mourão’s works. In 1988, he began photographing the grids protecting Rio’s air conditioners and trees. In the mid-1990s, he started to reproduce those grates, developing works such as House/Tree/Street (1996), in which he surrounded a tree with a house-shaped iron structure, or Another Thing (2003), a site-specific installation exhibited at the Museu Vale do Rio Doce in Espírito Santo. The latter piece consisted of a series of grid structures with some of which visitors were encouraged to interact, thus experiencing the feeling of being both behind bars and outside of them. Around 2009, having been invited by the theatre company Intrépida Trupe to design some sets, Mourão started his Balances series, a further development of the grid theme. Here the bars are kinetic, allowing viewers to set them in motion, thus creating myriad new presentations while expanding notions of inside and outside.