Athi Patra Ruga, The Night of the Long Knives III, 2013 (Cor­tesia Athi Patra Ruga e Wha­tiftheworld Gal­lery)

Inau­gu­ra na próxima sexta as 22h a ex­po­sição Ar­tistas Com­pro­me­tidos? Talvez, na Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian em Lisboa com curadoria de Antonio Pinto Ribeiro e participação dos artistas Athi-Patra Ruga, Berna Reale, Bouchra Khalili, Bruno Boudjelal, Celestino Mondlane, Conrad Botes, Demián Flores, Eduardo Basualdo, Eva Grubinger, Fredy Alzate, Johanna Calle, João Ferro Martins, Luiz Zerbini, Miguel Jara, Paul Edmunds, Pedro Barateiro, Raul Mourão, Sandra Monterroso, Simon Gush, Solon Ribeiro, Wim Botha.

Na mesma sexta as 24h acontece o Baile na Ga­ragem da Fun­dação Ca­louste Gul­ben­kian. Com Lyndon Barry con­vidando La Flama Blanca que nos úl­timos dois anos tem con­ta­giado a ci­dade de Lisboa com sons la­tino-ame­ri­canos.

visitação: Terça – Domingo | 10h às 18h

Entrada gratuita aos domingos
Fechado às segundas-feiras

20 Jun 2014 – 7 Set 2014

Galeria de Exposições Temporárias – Edifício Sede – Piso 0 e Jardim

Entrada 4 €

No site do Financial Times

New York, May 13 2014: as afternoon turned into evening, limousines lined up outside Christie’s Rockefeller Plaza headquarters. Elegantly dressed visitors made their way past Marc Quinn’s eye-catching sculpture of supermodel Kate Moss twisted into a gravity-defying yoga position, their attention focused on the evening ahead. Could the art market also continue to defy gravity and climb even higher than it had already?

Six months earlier, in November 2013, Christie’s had pulverised market records with a sale of contemporary art that totalled $691.5m – the highest for any auction. It included a new high for any work of art at auction, when Las Vegas casino billionaire Elaine Wynn spent $142.4m on Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies of Lucian Freud”; and a new record for a living artist as Jeff Koons’ shiny orange “Balloon Dog” romped to $58.4m.

On May 13 the saleroom was packed. All the regulars were there: Larry Gagosian, kingpin of art dealers; members of the Mugrabi family, traders with a massive position in Warhol and Basquiat paintings; François Pinault, luxury-goods mogul, owner of Christie’s, collector, and founder of two museums in Venice. And the glitterati, too: designer Marc Jacobs; Olivier Sarkozy, half-brother of France’s former president Nicolas, snuggling up to his fiancée, the actress-turned-fashion designer Mary-Kate Olsen. And, above the main floor, in “light-boxes” or private rooms with a view of the action, were the players who wanted to see but not be seen.

©Christie’s

A Jackson Pollock from the sale

The sale started in high gear. Lot eight – a lucky number in China – was “Poisson Volant”, a mobile by Alexander Calder swinging lazily above the room. Christie’s Hong Kong-based Asian business development director Xin Li, bidding on behalf of Asian clients, beat out Gagosian to pay $25.9m – almost twice the estimate – after a dogged battle.

The records piled up: a word painting by Christopher Wool at $23.7m, a Barnett Newman at $84m: as the sale progressed, even seasoned dealers were stunned. “Holy moly,” whispered dealer and collector Adam Lindemann to his neighbour as a Warhol White Marilyn zipped to $41m; by the end, the sale had totalled almost $745m – the highest-grossing ever.

. . .

Those of us who have worked in the art market for many years find this new world almost unrecognisable. I started reporting from Paris in the 1980s when Van Gogh and Renoir were fetching the highest auction prices, and a top art fair was the Biennale des Antiquaires, featuring Louis XV ormolu-mounted lacquer commodes and Sèvres porcelain. Impressionist paintings were must-haves, particularly during the hysterical years at the end of the decade when Japanese buyers drove the market to frenzied heights, only for it to collapse after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 and the property market tanked.

Those of us who have worked in the art market since the 1980s find this new world almost unrecognisable

In the late 1980s and early 1990s contemporary art was hardly sold at auction. While there was a brief “greed is good” interlude in the 1980s – when Julian Schnabel and others enjoyed superstar status – this ended with the 1990 slump. The art world was mainly US- and EU-centric: Chinese art mainly meant Ming porcelain, Indian art Mughal miniatures. Communism or dictatorships closed off Russia, China and Latin America from trading much in art. The Gulf states were not on anyone’s art radar.

In 1995, when I moved to Japan, the country suffered the twin blows of the Kobe earthquake and a terrorist attack in the Tokyo subway. The country’s miracle period of economic growth was over and I watched as banks tried to offload the massive inventory of paintings bought in the “bubble” years, often selling works at a tenth or less of the prices they had previously paid.

Back in the UK in 2000, I saw the first dotcom boom collapse, sweeping away early adopters’ predictions that the internet would propel the art market upwards by finding new buyers around the world.

Then, from 2004 onwards, it all changed. The market for contemporary and modern art began to grow powerfully, barely flinching after the 2008-09 global crisis. It has continued to grow, galvanised by new players, from giant art fairs to massively rich new collectors and emerging economies, as well as changing roles for auction houses and galleries. In my new book Big Bucks – The Explosion of the Art Market in the 21st Century I look at how this happened.

©Christie’s

Basquiat’s ‘Untitled’ (1981) went for $34.9m last month

One of the biggest changes has been the transformation of the auction houses into international “art businesses”, offering a range of services that increasingly encroach on art galleries’ traditional turf. Then there’s been a polarisation of art galleries into a few huge operations straddling the globe – and the rest. Faced by the challenge of these mega-galleries that poach their successful artists, and from auction houses that, increasingly, are selling works of art privately or through dedicated sale outlets, thesmaller galleries find it hard to survive in this climate. As some smaller galleries have closed, behemoths such as White Cube’s Bermondsey space or Hauser & Wirth’s Savile Row premises have put on big shows as well as supporting exhibitions in publicly-funded galleries.

Another change since the beginning of this century has been the explosion of contemporary and modern art fairs. There are more than 220 major ones, with new ones being announced all the time, notably one in Los Angeles in 2015. They, and the 100 or so biennales that are often also partly selling events, have expanded the market, as well as providing a seductive event-driven lifestyle.

The influence of new buyers from emerging economies, particularly from China, Russia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, has upended the traditional landscape of collecting, formerly dominated by the US and Europe. A new army of intermediaries – called “art advisers” – help collectors negotiate the art world, providing necessary “access”, which means being allowed to buy the work of the most sought-after artists. Most of us can’t walk in and buy a well-known artist’s work. The gallery will want to “place” the work in a good collection or museum, and prevent it being resold quickly for a higher price.

Then there are independent curators who have carved out a new role putting together shows for biennales, galleries and individuals. Their influence on what is good art today has to an extent replaced the artistic agenda once set by museums and art critics.

My researches also took me into the underbelly of a largely unregulated trade in art, where opacity and secrecy make it a fertile terrain for questionable deals. (Some drug barons will accept a painting rather than money; by reselling the art they pocket a “clean” sum.) And art – transportable, difficult to evaluate – is handy for tax evasion as well.

. . .

A key factor in the art market boom is the growth of global wealth. In 2013 there were a record 2,170 billionaires in the world, according to research group Wealth-X, and many have founded private museums or art spaces. Many of the new super-rich are far younger than the collectors of yesterday, and their tastes influence the high-impact immediacy of much contemporary art. The new collectors need living artists to keep the fairs, auctions, galleries and biennales afloat with new creations. In contrast, there is a shrinking inventory in other sections of the market, be it impressionist painting or Renaissance sculpture. The top works are in museums or in major collections. New buyers, however deep their pockets, would find it near-impossible to create a museum of anything except contemporary art.

The boom at the top isn’t, however, trickling down to all artists: according to Clare McAndrew, who runs research and consulting group Arts Economics, high-end dealers report that top collectors are only interested in the work of 50 to 100 artists, overwhelmingly modern and contemporary. One dealer told me that the “conformity in the global market today [is] due to the internet – everyone wants the same few things”.

While art and money have always been linked, there is now greater convergence between the worlds of art and finance. In the sale described at the beginning of this article, 40 of the 72 lots carried some sort of guarantee, with 29 financed by Christie’s and 11 by unidentified third parties. This meant that more than half of the lots were presold at a secret price – the only question was whether another buyer would put in a higher bid.

©Christie’s

Jeff Koons’ ‘Balloon Dog’ fetched $58.4m in November

The auction houses say that by taking any risk out of the auction, they attract consignors who otherwise might hesitate to send something to auction in case it is “burnt” by not finding a buyer. The guarantors are happy to acquire the art at the price they set – or they get a cut if it sells for a higher price to someone else.

Though guarantees have been around since at least the 1950s, they have been a key element in inflating recent prices. Also driving them up has been the phenomenon of speculators “flipping” works by young artists, buying massively into a first show and then put the art into auction for sometimes high returns. The film producer Stefan Simchowitz is reported to have bought 34 paintings by the Colombian Oscar Murillo for a total of about $50,000 early in the artist’s career: the works now make up to $400,000 at auction.

. . .

Everyone wants to know whether this market is a bubble and, if so, when it will burst? This seems unlikely to happen any time soon: the sheer amount of global wealth; the massive museum-building programmes; the positioning of art as an element of the celebrity and fashion worlds, and the seductive lifestyle the art world offers are all very attractive to the super-rich.

But I like to keep in mind what the Chinese say: “Trees can’t grow as high as the sky.” All markets are cyclical; the art market has had booms and busts before, for example, during the armed conflicts of the 20th century, in the 1970s and in 1990: each time mirroring the global economy.

There are parallels between this situation and the art market in England between 1860 and 1914, “the golden age of the living painter”, according to art historian Gerald Reitlinger. It was a time of rapid economic growth thanks to the technological revolution, and new patrons of art came from these manufacturing and trading fortunes.

The sometimes scandalous lives of Pre-Raphaelite artists and their circle were well publicised; advances in printing meant that 600,000 impressions were sold of Millais’ winsome child, “Cherry Ripe”. Contemporary artists were stars: Edwin Long’s florid “The Babylonian Marriage Market” (1875) sold in 1882 for £6,615 (almost £700,000 today) – then a record for a living English painter. It was bought by Thomas Holloway, a multimillionaire from sales of ointment and medicines. The art establishment was outraged, and in Holloway’s obituary the Art Journal sniffed: “Those whose productions he acquired may possibly have to regret the inflated prices which . . . their works assumed.”

Long’s prices did collapse, along with those of many Victorian artists. The first world war and the Great Depression would end that boom.

How will today’s art stars fare in the future? Major political upheavals or financial problems inevitably have an impact on investment and the art market cannot be immune. Almost all the huge prices are, however, being made as a growing pool of ultra-rich buyers battles for a small number of brand-name works. There is a vast hinterland of good art by creators whose names will never be widely known and whose works will never achieve such heights. The overall trend of the market is upwards, historically, but not for everyone, and not always.

Marc Quinn’s “Myth Venus”, the Kate Moss statue outside the extraordinary Christie’s sale, made $1.3m at auction last month but it is impossible to predict whether the empty-eyed beauty will turn out to be a good, bad or unremarkable investment.

Georgina Adam is art market correspondent of the FT and art market editor-at-large of The Art Newspaper.

On June 20 she will speak at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, about her book ‘Big Bucks: The Explosion of the Art Market in the 21st Century’ (Lund Humphries) published later this month.

 

lá no Hyperallergic

Skewville’s Bushwick sign on a rooftop on Flushing Avenue (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)

People’s reactions to Bushwick Open Studios (BOS) generally fall into two passionate camps: those who love the event and those who despise it. The latter group often gripes about the crowds around the Morgan Avenue subway stop, the boisterous atmosphere around that hub (the epicenter of the party area is Bogart and Grattan Streets), and the throng of artists and gawkers from outside the neighborhood eager to get in on some of the action. Yet those who enjoy BOS, myself included, know that steering clear of the two blocks radiating from Bogart and Grattan is largely necessary (unless you’re eating atMOMO’s Sushi Shack; I always avoid Roberta’s) and the real treats are in the far-flung spaces, the one-on-one conversations in off-the-beaten-path locales. It’s a rookie mistake to think “Bushwick” is only northwest of Flushing Avenue or that the focus isn’t on community building.

This year I spent agreat deal of time exploring the spokes of Broadway west of Myrtle, where a new axis of “South Bushwick Art” is starting to form. Stretching from the Flushing Avenue J/M/Z station to the Kosciuszko stop, this new cluster, on the edge of the Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhoods, includes long-time resident Grace Exhibition Space, some not-so-new spaces, like Airplane and Microscope galleries, and some more recent additions, like Wayfarers and even Good Work Gallery.

Left, Odetta gallery opening on Saturday; right, a work by Brent Owens on display at “South Bushwick Art” gallery Wayfarers

That new area was a discovery for me, and the studios associated with Wayfarers and Good Work were both quite good. So was the community atmosphere at the Living Gallery, where an open mic event attracted aspiring beat poets, songwriters, and others eager for a chance to shine.

One of the participants in the Living Gallery’s open mic event last Saturday

The standouts from this year’s BOS were undoubtedly the group and gallery shows, even if they aren’t the focus of the weekend’s fun. Exhibitions like Do-It-Yourself, Communal Table, and others brought together some of the neighborhood’s strongest talents for curated experiences that were better than those of previous years. While “studios” are the focus of BOS, I have a hunch that curated shows are probably its future. Bushwick Open Studios has always been a community-building effort, and the goal is inclusion; shows like Do-It-Yourself, with 11 curators and dozens of artists, demonstrates how that could look.

Visitors playing with a sculpture that was part of REAL on Rock Street

Arts in Bushwick, which runs BOS, is one of the neighborhood arts community’s real success stories. As a grassroots, volunteer-run organization, they have toiled away at creating bonds and bridges between artists, arts entities around the city, and different groups of local residents and schools in the area. AiB has created a high school fellows program, and launched a Community Team that runs a variety of programs and events to serve youth and families in Bushwick. If BOS feels unwieldy, which it long has, it’s because Bushwick is really four or five geographic communities rolled into one, and Arts in Bushwick has long attempted (with varying levels of success) to sew them all together into one big quilt.

A look inside the Newd Art Show

This year the Newd Art Show really added another dimension to the weekend, since it highlighted some of the many strong galleries in the neighborhood (Regina Rex, Theodore:Art, Sardine) and brought in a few others from surrounding areas (American Medium gallery is from neighboring Bedford-Stuyvesant, while Rawson Projects is headquartered in Greenpoint, for instance) to create a hub for the commercial face of the area’s art scene.

Newd was a well-curated experience by fair organizers, with some incredibly strong galleries and a few weaker ones. While sales from the fair may not have been phenomenal (a number of galleries told me they sold one or two works though they remained tight-lipped on prices), sales did happen, and some established collectors arrived to tour the compact fair. Newd also launched their artist’s contract experiment to provide artists with negotiated resale royalty provisions. When I asked the fair yesterday, I was told 10 contracts had already been signed on work sold.

A site-specific kinetic sculpture by Brazilian artist Raul Mourão at the Newd Art Show

The overwhelming topic of conversation throughout the weekend was the “g” word, gentrification, and the art community’s role. I myself took part in two panels on Sunday that tackled the issue, and I know there was at least one other panel on the same topic in a different Bushwick location. The conversation has reached a fevered pitch, though none of this weekend’s panels was nearly as well-attended as a similar one I moderated a few years back at Bogart Salon, which was located at 56 Bogart. While the art community may be slowly digesting the realities of change in Bushwick, Deborah Brown, artist, gallerist, nonprofit board member, and member of the Bushwick community board, explained at panels throughout the day how more anxiety is bubbling up around the issue than ever before. With artists and hipsters spread past the industrial parks into more established residential neighborhoods, and the large 977-unit Rheingold Brewery site slated for development into largely market-rate apartments, you can see why longtime residents worry that their neighborhood is quickly disappearing.

Looking east down Wyckoff Avenue

Bushwick is a big swathe of northern Brooklyn, and it seems clear that in the coming year it will fragment as gentrification intensifies in the west towards Brownsville, north into Ridgewood, and south into Bed-Stuy. Micro-neighborhoods will develop (West Bushwick? So(uth)Bu(shwick)? Bushwood?), white-collar professionals will follow, and more condos will be built. Until then BOS continues to provide a human face to a community by connecting its disparate elements as best it can. Arts in Bushwick’s accomplishment is amazing, and they should be proud.

no site do NYT

Bushwick Open Studios, a free art tour organized by a group of local volunteers, will run from tomorrow until Sunday in the Brooklyn neighborhood that’s been lauded (and in some cases, decried) as the next coolest thing. What began as a midsize festival in 2006 with 85 studios has become an enormous, hectic jumble with more than 600 participants. For the duration of the weekend, galleries, studios, warehouses, basements, parking lots and other locales will be open to the public daily, with artists (such as Samantha French, whose work is pictured above) milling around to discuss their works. There will also be music, panel discussions and local food. Even with an online directory, an app and printed maps that can be found at one of B.O.S.’s nine hubs, it’s an overwhelming amount of art to take in, so here is a shortlist of galleries and group shows not to be missed.

Allen Glatter, “Western Movies,” 2013, at NEWD Art Show.

NEWD Art Show
Intended to complement the experience of Bushwick Open Studios,NEWD Art Show — housed in the 1896, the building where the now-infamous “Girls” warehouse party episode was shot — will bring together nonprofits, artist-run galleries, collectives and project spaces. Its curators, Kibum Kim and Kate Bryan, are high school friends with solid art-world credentials — Kim teaches at Sotheby’s Institute and Bryan spent time at Sotheby’s and Andrea Rosen Gallery — who are seeking to lure collectors and cognoscenti to Bushwick. The work on view will be in a variety of media, from video to concrete-infused foam to aluminum. Talks will revolve around issues relevant to enterprising up-and-comers; one on Friday afternoon, featuring assistant curators from the Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum and the New Museum, will focus on how to bring emerging artists into established institutions.
592 Johnson Avenue, newdartshow.com.

Interstate Projects
This established local gallery will feature the work of Justin Berry, an artist who takes photographs within video games and makes pictures out of words. Don’t forget to visit the downstairs section of the gallery, where images of the sky and the earth each cover one wall, while orchestral scores play dramatically in the background.
66 Knickerbocker Avenue, interstateprojects.com.

Julia Curylo, “Chicks,” (2013), at Art 3.

Art 3
As part of its inaugural exhibition and participation in B.O.S., Art 3 will showcase the works of 12 artists from around the globe. Standouts include “Picnic,” a painting by Andre von Marisse that reimagines Edouard Manet’s iconic “Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe” as a scene involving characters from the Popeye cartoons, and Julia Curylo’s “Chicks,” chicken-shaped inflatables covered with imagery that references famous female artists like Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keeffe.
109 Ingraham Street, Suite 102, art-3gallery.com.

Signal Gallery
In a neighborhood with more warehouses than trees, a gallery show highlighting work made with industrial and architectural materials makes perfect sense. This weekend (and beyond), this large, sparse space will feature the works of three artists, Andrew Laumann, Jesse Hlebo and Nicholas Gottlund, who utilize discarded film posters, burnt plywood and recycled paper pulp, respectively. Their pieces are meditations on the degeneration and purposeful destruction of systems, and the waste and byproducts that result. Of particular note are Laumann’s sculpture-paintings, which recall the spontaneity of Impressionism but are actually made of tiny scraps of paper that have been methodically applied and reapplied.
260 Johnson Avenue, ssiiggnnaall.com.

lá no site do ft

The Brazilian artist progressed from primly modernist abstraction to messily hippie improvisation

I entered the Museum of Modern Art’s Lygia Clark retrospective at the wrong end, which shouldn’t have mattered, because the Brazilian artist’s epiphany came when she learnt to love the infinite loop. The first piece I encountered was “Caminhando” (Walking), from 1963, in which she invited viewers to construct their own Möbius strip out of paper and glue, then keep cutting along its length until the band narrowed to nothing. This arts-and-crafts project seemed like a reasonable starting point for a life in art, but I soon realised I had begun at the climax of Clark’s career: the moment when she handed off the work of creation to the viewers themselves. A few years later she finally abandoned art-making for a kind of anarchic therapy. She settled in Rio, treating patients through a process she called “structuring of the self”, until her death in 1988.

MoMA’s show is a curiously hermetic affair, following the interior progress of an artist who is practically unknown in the US. A little context might have alleviated the sensation of wandering into an advanced seminar on a rarefied and not terribly interesting topic. Clark’s various phases, discoveries, and retreats resolve themselves not into a Möbius-like loop but a more or less linear trajectory, from prim modernism to wacked-out, body-based improvisation. An alternative story remains untold: Clark’s native country went through spasms of cultural and political turmoil during her career, but for curators Luis Pérez-Oramas and Connie Butler she might as well be a lone visionary on a deserted planet.

Lygia Pimentel Lins was born in 1920 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Married at 18 to a civil engineer named Aluízio Clark Ribeiro, in 1950 she took off for Paris to study painting, with three children in tow. By the mid-1950s she was producing standard modernist abstractions. “Composition” (c.1952) echoes Klee in its delicate colours and gridlike structure. “Discovery of the Organic Line” (1954) stars a floating red square straight out of El Lissitzky. Shades of Mondrian haunted her through the mid-1950s, forcing her shapes into strict geometries.

At that time, North American artists, disgusted by the carnage of the second world war and the bankruptcy of all ideologies, turned inward, pioneering a kind of free-form abstraction derived from surrealism. Clark reached further back, to leftist visions dreamt up in prewar Russia and Germany. She briefly found hope in the strict rationalism of mathematics and in the broken promise of modernism.

By the late 1950s though, Clark was no longer satisfied with airless geometries. She began to open up her abstractions by inserting linear breathing spaces between panels. Two floating black squares are separated by what she calls an “organic line”, an inviting white fissure in an otherwise forbiddingly pristine plane. Similar incisions appear in other works from this period, too. Some planes are divided into puzzle-like pieces that fit snugly together, leaving only the slenderest cracks. Other paintings extend into frames that are flush with the painted surface. Clark simultaneously draws our attention to the image’s edge and its boundlessness.

She kept trying different tactics to yank in the viewer. She cut and pasted papers into optical experiments, where black and white areas alternately recede and jut forward. The collages depend on the viewer’s willingness to wrestle with their shifting architecture. They’re fun, but shallow. If Clark’s career had ended in the 1950s, I doubt we’d be hearing much about her now. It was only after she enlisted the audience’s active participation that her work leapt into another dimension. She began to unfold the layers of her paintings into sculptures called “Bichos” (Critters), seriously playful objects that pried viewers from their passivity, obliging them to interact with artworks as if they were living, breathing organisms.

Clark translated the vital lines that had erupted through her paintings into hinges, while two-dimensional planes became steel and aluminum sheets that participants could manipulate and recombine, like metallic origami. MoMA has appealingly recreated a number of these for us to play with, while Clark’s originals wistfully look on from their sacred plinths. She may have wanted people to manhandle her work, but it’s far too valuable these days for such destructive high jinks.

This period culminated in “Caminhando”, which marks the beginning of the end of her involvement with art – and also of MoMA’s exhibition. “From here on I attribute an absolute importance to the immanent act carried out by the participant,” she announced at the time. “‘Caminhando’ has all the possibilities connected to action itself. It allows choice, the unpredictable, and the transformation of a virtual into a concrete event.” That “choice” presents itself as a series of limited decisions: to cut down the centre, or at the side, or gradually guide the scissors left to right? There are echoes of the way Fluxus artists toyed with the public too: Yoko Ono commanded audiences to “Light canvas or any finished painting with a cigarette at any time for any length of time”, and Ken Friedman mischievously ordered viewers of his 1963 “Fruit Sonata” to “Play baseball with a fruit.”

Clark lacked that wry humour, though. Her antics married the rhetoric of self-help to hippie spirituality. She concentrated on making “sensorial objects” such as cloth masks with distorting eye holes and snouts stuffed with herbs, or glasses equipped with adjustable mirrors – things that would, she hoped, boost awareness of our own bodies. At MoMA, a team of “facilitators” helped me navigate a table stocked with replicas of Clark’s contraptions. One demonstrated how to float a rock on a plastic bag filled with air. Another tied her hand to mine with a kind of twisted elastic bandage, extending the Möbius strip into the realm of human relationships.

Videos around the room broadcast some of the sessions Clark led among her students. In “Baba antropofágica” (Anthropophagic slobber), participants slowly disgorge saliva-laden filaments that they lay across a prone colleague, covering him in a moist, wispy web. They then proceed to massage him. “It is the first act in a ritual of phantasmatic exorcism for the emancipation of the body,” Clark explained, unhelpfully. The encounter group meets the neo-primitive ritual, giving birth, as it were, to a groovy mysticism. That shaggy ethos has not aged well and, like almost everything else in this arid show, seems almost brutally dated.

‘Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art’, to August 24, moma.org

NEWD Art Show is a new art fair that will bring together artist collectives, project spaces, non-profits and galleries to promote emerging art initiatives and foster a conversation on how best to support young artists—by organizing talks on artist-centric issues, offering negotiated resale rights as an option for sales, and showcasing Artist Pension Trust.

Exhibitors

American Medium, a Bedford-Stuyvesant gallery

LAW OFFICE, since 1998

Marina T. Schindler, an independent curator

Rawson Projects, a Greenpoint gallery

Regina Rex, a Bushwick artist collective

Residency Unlimited, a Carroll Gardens non-profit

Sardine, a Bushwick gallery

Signal, a Bushwick gallery

Theodore:Art, a Bushwick gallery

Artists

Conor Backman / John Dante Bianchi / Marc Breslin / Andres Carranza / Holly Coulis / Robert Davis / Vincent Dermody / Hayden Dunham / Alex Eagleton / Allen Glatter / Dave Hardy / EJ Hauser / Sophie Hirsch / Lukas Hofer / Sheree Hovsepian / M+L (Marie Karlberg & Lena Henke) / Scooter Laforge / Raul Mourão / Brenna Murphy / Bill Mutter / Jon Rafman / Bennet Schlesinger / Leah Tacha / Stewart Uoo / Jonathan VanDyke / Pedro Velez / JD Walsh

* Artist Pension Trust will be exhibiting a new presentation of sixteen video works by an international roster of member artists titled “We’ve All Got Issues: Video Art from the APT Collection.”

Talks Program

Friday May 30

2pm: Emerging Artists in the $1 Billion Contemporary Art Market: A Panel

Moderator: Andrew M. Goldstein, Editor-in-Chief of Artspace

Josh Baer, Publisher of Baer Faxt

Rob Davis, artist

Lowell Pettit, Co-Director of Pettit Art Partners

4pm: Exhibiting Emerging Artists in the Era of Blockbuster Shows: A Panel

Moderator: Jens Hoffmann, Deputy Director, The Jewish Museum

Rujeko Hockley, Assistant Curator, Brooklyn Museum

Thomas J. Lax, Assistant Curator, The Studio Museum

Margot Norton, Assistant Curator, New Museum

Saturday May 31

2pm: Presentation of Level Rights’s Negotiated Resale Rights Platform

Franklin Boyd, Founder of Level Rights

Sunday June 1

2pm: Sustaining Art Communities in the Face of Gentrification: A Panel

Moderator: Hrag Vartanian, Editor-in-Chief of Hyperallergic

Deborah Brown, Founder of Storefront 10 Eyck

William Powhida, artist

Private Preview

The NEWD Art Show is adopting a split-cost model; thus the private preview will serve as a fundraiser to defray the costs of participation in support of emerging art initiatives. The event will feature a performance by Kalup Linzy and a DJ set by Paskal Daze. Dinner and drinks will be provided by Roberta’s. Tickets are available online at newdartshow.com.

Location

The fair will be held at the 1896—a NEWD sponsor—located at 592 Johnson Avenue, Brooklyn (near the Jefferson stop on the L). That same weekend, the neighborhood will also host the eighth edition of Bushwick Open Studios, set to feature over 600 artist studios and exhibitions.

A two room installation by Carlito Carvalhosa.

In these rooms, the floor is lined with rows of glowing flourescent tubes and the space is interrupted and criss-crossed from floor to ceiling by dozens of large wooden shafts, disrupting the usual flow of movement through the gallery rooms and thus altering perception of the interior. The heavy poles, the kind usually used to support telephone lines, puncture the walls and descend from the ceiling to rest upon transparent drinking glasses, creating a flow of light and gravity. For Carvalhosa, material is not a barrier to the enactment of an idea, the material is the fulfillment of the idea.

Carvalhosa’s work is an ongoing exploration of the reconfiguration of architectural spaces, often via unexpected juxtapositions of interior/exterior objects and everyday materials.

amanhã lá estarei nos jardins do MoMA com meu grande amigo Carlito Carvalhosa a ler um Rio de Clark junto com outros amigos queridos > Daniel Perlin, Gustavo Prado, Gabriel Giucci etc

lá no site do Valor

Mostra no MoMA é a maior jamais dedicada a um dos nomes centrais do neoconcretismo brasileiro

A redescoberta de Lygia Clark (1920-1988) pelo mercado, que ganhava destaque cada vez maior nos últimos anos, se consumou no ano passado, quando a tela “Superfície Modulada nº 4” foi arrematada por R$ 5,3 milhões na Bolsa de Arte de São Paulo, tornando-se a obra de arte mais cara de um artista brasileiro negociada em leilão. A expectativa, a partir desta semana, é a de o poder de atração da artista mineira chegar ao grande público americano. Quase 300 obras representando a trajetória de Lygia, de forma mais ou menos cronológica, estarão à mostra na maior exposição jamais dedicada a um dos nomes centrais do neoconcretismo brasileiro. “Lygia Clark: O Abandono da Arte, 1948-1988”, inaugurada neste sábado no Museu de Arte Moderna de Nova York (MoMA), reúne pinturas, desenhos, esculturas e “objetos relacionais” e ocupa, até o fim de agosto, metade do sexto andar e toda uma galeria no quarto andar da prestigiosa instituição de Manhattan.

Quando os curadores começaram a pensar na curadoria, levaram em conta que o grande público no Hemisfério Norte ainda desconhece o trabalho da Lygia. “E os especialistas, em geral, pensam – e isso quero ressaltar – que a conhecem com alguma propriedade. O que queríamos de fato mostrar era a produção de uma artista interessada em refletir sobre a transição do pensamento moderno para a arte contemporânea, de forma singularíssima, a partir da chamada periferia do planeta”, diz, em ótimo português, o curador de Arte Latino-Americana do MoMA e responsável pela curadoria da mais recente edição da Bienal Internacional de Arte de São Paulo, Luis Pérez-Oramas, um “venezuelano com alma de brasileiro”, como costuma se apresentar aos interlocutores sul-americanos cuja língua materna não é o castelhano.

Por essa razão, a divisão da mostra é em temas específicos e ela foi pensada com a certeza de que seria “assumidamente grandiosa, a ser percorrida com calma, voltada para a integração do visitante com a obra plástica e, especialmente, por meio de seu aspecto sensorial, bem ao gosto de Lygia”.

“O Abandono da Arte” é fruto da sensibilidade e da dedicação física e intelectual de Pérez-Oramas e da principal curadora do Museu Hammer de Los Angeles, Connie Butler, sua parceira na cerzidura da exposição. Não menos importante foi a participação, em cada etapa da construção do evento, que inclui ainda uma série de filmes experimentais a ser apresentados na Cinemateca do MoMA, da família da artista.

Coube aos herdeiros de Lygia, que morreu em 1988 aos 67 anos, iniciarem, nas últimas décadas, um processo minucioso de catalogação de toda sua produção, fundamental para a revalorização no mercado de obras como a notória série “Bicho”, símbolo do processo de transformação da criação plástica em experiência de fato corpórea, atrelada à vida real, na definição do poeta e crítico Ferreira Gullar.

Um dos destaques da exposição, não por acaso, é a instalação de 8 metros “A Casa É o Corpo: Penetração, Ovulação, Germinação, Expulsão”, exposta inicialmente no Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM) do Rio no emblemático ano de 1968 e posteriormente apresentada na Bienal de Veneza. Percorra o simulacro de útero criado pela artista, deixe-se ser transportado para a escuridão, a asfixia, a claustrofobia do labirinto de Lygia, até a liberação do renascimento ao fim de um percurso em nada previsível, e a primeira reação é inevitável: a obra de arte criada há 47 primaveras é, no museu povoado por visitantes oriundos de todos os cantos do planeta, ainda uma experiência visceral, de tirar o fôlego do público.

Mostra deve ser percorrida com calma, voltada para a integração do visitante com a obra plástica e por meio de seu aspecto sensorial, recomenda curador do MoMA

“Um de nossos principais desafios foi o de criar uma exposição em que, em muitas galerias, os visitantes não poderiam, por motivos óbvios, tocar nas telas. Mas em outras, no entanto, eles eram, ao contrário, aconselhados, instigados, convidados a se integrar ao resultado do fazer artístico, a mexer, a entrar, a se jogar”, diz Connie Butler, uma das maiores divulgadoras da arte moderna e contemporânea brasileiras nos Estados Unidos. “Nesse sentido, essa é uma experiência única para nós e para o próprio MoMA aparentemente paradoxal, mas com uma lógica muito clara, paralela ao processo de experimentação da própria artista e de sua transformação no relacionamento com a arte.”

Além das experiências sensoriais participativas, em horários específicos os espectadores poderão participar até mesmo de simulações das práticas terapeutas incorporadas por Lygia em sua arte. Toda a terceira e última parte da exposição no sexto andar é dedicada a obras cujos objetos – sacos plásticos, pesadas luvas, pedras, máscaras, vários tipos de tecidos – são manipulados por monitores especialmente treinados para reinterpretar a relação entre a psicanálise e a arte, tema caro à artista desde a época em que viveu em Paris até o fim de sua vida.

O visitante é convidado a se deitar em um tatame, instalado no piso central da galeria, de onde pode interagir com os objetos criados por Lygia. O batismo da exposição – e a noção do “abandono da arte” – é espelhado de forma mais nítida em seu momento derradeiro, mas a costura do trajeto proposto pelos curadores se dá com base justamente na ideia de que Lygia Clark investigou de forma originalíssima o tratamento terapêutico por meio da arte. Em seu primeiro artigo sobre a mostra, o jornal “The New York Times” intitulou a descrição elogiosa de Ken Johnson assim: “Veja. Sinta. Toque. Cure-se”.

A aparente ênfase no anticonvencional ao se debruçar na obra de Lygia se dá, curiosamente, no momento em que o MoMA se vê em meio a uma de suas mais explícitas encruzilhadas. Presente na pré-abertura de “O Abandono da Arte”, Glenn D. Lowry, diretor do museu há duas décadas, enfrenta saraivada de críticas por causa do que parte da comunidade artística local detecta ser concessão demasiada ao gosto do grande público, uma fixação pela “espetacularização” das mostras e busca desenfreada por mais espaço físico. A instituição está em via de começar sua segunda expansão na era Lowry – à custa do vizinho prédio do Museu de Arte Folclórica, demolido no mês passado – para aumentar ainda mais o impressionante número de quase três milhões de visitantes/ano do MoMA.

No “New York Times”, Randy Kennedy escreveu que “muitos especialistas temem que a criação de uma ‘art bay’ na rua 53, com uma ala permanente cruzando o que antes era o espaço entre os dois prédios, agora a ser usada como palco de ‘eventos espontâneos’, com entrada franca no primeiro andar, incluindo uma nova área dedicada exclusivamente para performances, empurrará o museu em velocidade ainda maior para a necessidade de agradar a um gosto mais popular, à custa da seriedade e do distanciamento crítico da cultura pop que garantiram sua reputação”.

Não chega a surpreender, portanto, o fato de a maioria dos repórteres americanos questionar seguidamente os curadores e Lowry, na abertura para a imprensa da exposição dedicada à artista brasileira, sobre os reais resultados terapêuticos da experiência artística de Lygia Clark e suas conexões com as tradições freudianas ou lacanianas. Ou a reação imediata dos curadores em corrigir os que insistiam em nomear os “objetos relacionais” de Lygia de “instalações”.

“O Abandono da Arte”, no entanto, é estruturado de modo nítido em três grandes temas, quase totalmente independentes uns dos outros: primeiro, as experiências da artista com a abstração, desde o aprendizado com o paisagista Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994) nos anos 40; mais tarde, o período do neoconcretismo brasileiro, cujos outros dois nomes mais reconhecidos pelos americanos são os de Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980) e Lygia Pape (1907-2004); e, por fim, o “abandono da arte”, anunciado a partir de 1966, abrangendo as duas últimas décadas de produção da artista.

Na entrada da exposição, os primeiros trabalhos de Lygia, pinturas e desenhos criados entre 1948 a 1959, são marcados pela busca de uma abstração tridimensional e a negação da superfície plana, com o que os curadores perceberam ser tentativas explícitas de diálogo com precursores da geometria abstrata moderna, como Paul Klee (1879-1940), Fernand Léger (1881-1955), Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953), Max Bill (1908-1944) e Georges Vantongerloo (1886-1965). Entre os destaques, as “Superfícies Moduladas” e os “Planos em Superfícies Moduladas”.

Na sala dedicada ao “neoconcretismo” aparecem os trabalhos formais derradeiros da artista, com a maravilha imaginativa dos “Bichos” e a série “Trepantes”. Por fim, no “Abandono da Arte”, os “objetos sensoriais” – “Caminhando”, “Pedra e Ar”, “Respire Comigo”, “Diálogo de Mãos”, “Máscaras Sensoriais”, “Óculos”, “Diálogo de Óculos”, “Estruturas Vivas”, “Rede de Elásticos” – traduzem tanto a crise pessoal de Lygia quanto seu questionamento sobre a utilidade prática do fazer artístico. Algumas das criações mais radicais do período serão ativadas apenas em ocasiões especiais durante a semana, com o monitoramento de funcionários treinados pelo MoMA e o encorajamento de engajar do visitante, incluindo “Canibalismo”, “Viagem”, “Túnel”, “Baba Antropofágica” e “Estruturação do Self”.

Todos os passos da mostra são acompanhados pela cineasta e cenógrafa Daniela Thomas, que prepara um documentário produzido por Connie Lopes em parceria com Vanessa Clark, cuja linha narrativa será dada tanto pelas entrevistas com nomes fundamentais para o entendimento da arte brasileira contemporânea como pelas cartas e textos deixados pela própria Lygia.

“Ela foi uma das maiores influências em minha carreira e minha geração. Filmei toda a preparação para a exposição, acompanhei o trabalho dos curadores, terei no filme a voz de Paulo Herkenhoff e Gullar. A expectativa dos curadores, da família e a minha é a de que essa exposição e o registro audiovisual dela escancarem para o grande público do eixo do Atlântico Norte o que nós já sabemos: o tamanho, a dimensão, a grandiosidade da obra de Lygia Clark”, diz Daniela.

EXHIBITION DESIGN BY RICHARD MEIER

CURATED BY RAY SMITH

FEATURING WORKS BY:

Rita Ackermann, Lili Almog, Doug Argue, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Jay Batlle, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Phong Bui, Saint Clair Cemin, Francesco Clemente, Sante D’Orazio, Jamie Diamond, Aleksandar Duravcevic, Rhys Gaetano, Ron Gorchov, Benjamin Keating, James English Leary, Eugene Lemay, Lluís Lleó, Emanuele Lo Cascio, Christopher H. Martin, Raul Mourão, Antonio Murado, John Newsom, Ran Ortner, Yigal Ozeri, G.T. Pellizzi, Javier Rodriguez Plácido, Nathlie Provosty, Matt Reilly (Japanther), Shelter Serra, Ray Smith, Maxwell Snow, Swoon, Daniel Turner, Meyer Vaisman, Angel Vergara, and Andy Warhol.

For more information, please visit: www.manaexposition.com

Geraldo de Barros: Purity of Form
May 6 – June 21, 2014
Opening Reception: Friday, May 9, 6-8pm

Tierney Gardarin Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of works by Geraldo de Barros (1923-1998). This historic exhibition, the first solo presentation of the artist’s work in New York, features a diverse group of works that span de Barros’ extraordinary career. Geraldo de Barros: Purity of Form, explores a practice that, across decades, movements, and media, demonstrated a dogged commitment to artistic experimentation and abstraction. Geraldo de Barros: Purity of Form opens on Tuesday, May 6th and will be on view through Saturday, June 21st, 2014. The opening reception will be on Friday, May 9th from 6pm until 8pm.

Geraldo de Barros is a seminal figure in Brazilian art whose multi-faceted oeuvre, much like that of his contemporary Lygia Clark, is remarkable in its depth and scope. An early leader of Brazil’s Concrete movement, his practice engaged with painting, photography, sculpture and industrial design. De Barros first rose to prominence as a painter and founding member of Grupo XV in the 1940s, and soon after gained notoriety as an innovative and experimental photographer. He explored minimal form in photography through manipulating negatives, superimposing, scratching and painting on them, to create arresting abstractions he called Fotoformas. This technique of distillation and precision was later carried into sculpture, painting, and eventually industrial design. Geraldo de Barros: Purity of Form includes key pieces from de Barros’ practice, presenting the life work of a figure who is widely considered to be one of the most influential Brazilian artists of his generation.

Geraldo de Barros: Purity of Form will feature exceptional examples of the various aspects of de Barros’ practice. For example, brightly contrasted Formica paintings will be included, installed alongside the fantastic early Fotoformas. Also included are the later Sobras—a series of intricate photo collages created in the last two years of his life when, debilitated by illness, he returned to earlier photographs and original negatives. The unity and consistency of the works across decades and disparate media underscore the consistent theme of de Barros’ practice: purity of form.

Geraldo de Barros has been the subject of major solo exhibitions worldwide, most recently at The Photographer’s Gallery in London and the SESC Vila Mariana in Sao Paulo. His work is included in the permanent collections of internationally renowned institutions a such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland; Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami, FL; Ludwig Museum, Cologne, Germany; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Tate Modern in London, UK; among many others. A major monograph about his life and work, entitled geraldo de barros: isso, was published in 2013 by SESC Editions.

For press inquiries, please contact Maria Kucinski or for more information, please contact Denis Gardarin at 212.594.0550.

For any inquiries, please contact Denis Gardarin at denis@tierneygardarin.com or 212.594.0550.

Above: Geraldo de Barros, Fotoforma São Paulo, from the “Fotoforma” series, 1949/2013.
Silver gelatin print on fiber paper. 15.88 x 11.88 inches (40.3 x 30.2 cm). Edition of 15.

peguei lá no site da galeria.

aqui o endereço:

546 West 29th Street
New York, NY 10001

lá no site da FT Magazine

Renata Lucas

Born: Ribeirão Preto, 1971

Format: Installation and sculpture

Well-known works: “Falha”, 2003; “Venice Suitcase”, 2009; “Kunst-Werke”, 2010

Why she is important: Lucas produces few pieces – no more than 10 per year. Her primary market is very scarce but as the works are all unique they find buyers almost immediately. She has exhibited at the most reputable international events and institutions – Venice Biennale, Sao Paulo Bienal, Documenta and Tate Modern. Great works to have – if you can find one.

‘

Cinthia Marcelle

Born: Belo Horizonte, 1974

Format: Performance, film, photography and installation

Well-known work: “Sobre este mesmo mundo”, 2009, right

Why she is important: She stages a situation and then allows it to evolve organically. Her international exposure is growing, with exhibitions at the Istanbul Biennal, Tate Modern and the Sharjah Biennial 11. She was one of the first contemporary artists to be awarded the Future Generation Prize.

Marcius Galan

Born: Indianapolis, 1974

Format: Installation, sculpture, drawing

Well-known works: “Diagonal Section”, 2008; “Three sections”, 2008; Isolantes, 2011

Why he is important: Galan is a dynamic artist who is constantly producing works and is in huge demand among collectors. Last year he exhibited at the São Paulo Bienal and had a solo exhibition at the White Cube gallery in London. This is an artist who is going through a phase of professional expansion and prolific production.

Jonathas de Andrade

Born: Maceió, 1982

Format: Installation

Well-known works: “Tropical Hangover”, 2009; “Education for Adults”, 2010; “Yesterday Today”, 2011 Why he is important De Andrade has exhibited at the Bienal in São Paulo, La Bienal 2013 at El Museo del Barrio in New York and London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. Not all collectors can own one of his pieces: his gallery gives preference to museums and collectors with a long track record. So if you want an Andrade, you’d better start building a relationship with his dealers first.

André Komatsu

Born: São Paulo, 1978

Format: Performance, installation, drawing, sculpture

Well-known work: “Como se comporta o que se consome, como se consome o que se comporta”, 2009, below

Why he is important: His work explores ideas of urbanism, architecture and boundaries. He reuses materials found in urban spaces and is prolific, producing up to 50 pieces a year. Half his market is in Brazil and the other half is distributed across the UK, US and Latin America. His profile is set to increase, with growing interest from institutions such as Tate Modern.

Francesca Bellini Joseph is director of art consultancy Portafolia. She is specialist in growth art markets and a consultant professor at Sotheby´s Institue Online. She is co-author of Kingston Smith Latin American art market report 2013 co-produced by Portafolia and ArtTactic.

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.