print December 2000

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Mounting an exhibition of the work of the late Cuban-born American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957-96) represents a serious challenge. How can one shed light on a relatively small body of work that has been so widely exhibited, reproduced, and collected? Curator Lisa Corrin did it by taking into consideration one of the artist’s main concerns: how meaning shifts and travels through different contexts. Eschewing a chronological approach, she offered stimulating juxtapositions of works, enlightening even viewers who might have felt all too familiar with the artist’s candy spills, paper stacks,

previews September 2000

Brasil 1920–1950: From Anthropophagy to Brasília

Brazilian fever? Judging by the rash of shows, in Brazil as well as abroad, occasioned by the quincentennial of the Portuguese arrival, there may be evidence of widespread contagion in venues on both sides of the Atlantic. “Brasil 1920–1950” promises at the very least a serious reconsideration of the Latin American giant's rich cultural history. Focusing on the period of Modernismo, the exhibition encompasses the visual arts, literature, music, film, urbanism, and architecture—an exercise in interdisciplinarity worthy of high Brazilian modernism itself. The team of curators, led by Jorge

previews May 2000

Daniel Senise

Daniel Senise is widely considered the chief figure of the Brazilian “Geração Oitenta,” or “Eighties Generation,” which, like its German, Italian, and American counterparts, proposed a return to painting (read neo-Expressionism). Organized by Museu de Arte Moderna chief curator Agnaldo Farias, this large-scale retrospective brings together a wide range of Senise's work, from the melancholy, painterly canvases of the '80s to his more Conceptual experiments of the '90s. An extensive volume with essays by Farias and Cecilia Almeida Salles will be published on the occasion of the exhibition.

previews May 2000

Arte/Cidade 4: Brasmitte

For the fourth in a series of exhibitions organized under the theme of art and the metropolis, cultural critic Nelson Brissac Peixoto has invited an international roster of twenty-five artists and architects to develop site-specific works in São Paulo's Zona Leste. With the renovation of Berlin's Mitte designated as paradigm, interventions by the likes of Ana Maria Tavares, Mauricio Dias and Walter Riedweg, Rem Koolhaas, and Vito Acconci target a district currently the focus of various urban restructuring initiatives. The resulting exhibition will animate key issues surrounding redevelopment

print January 2000

Santiago Sierra

Spanish-born Santiago Sierra is one of a group of young expatriate artists who live and work in Mexico City, perhaps seduced by that singular setting—huge, chaotic, polluted—and the way in which the country’s complex and contradictory social, political, and cultural conditions are made manifest on every street.

For his recent exhibition, curated by Taiyana Pimentel as part of the Museo Rufino Tamayo’s new Sala 7 program, Sierra presented 465 personas remuneradas, 1999, a kind of performance that took place on the opening night of the show. Visitors to the space (after that night) were greeted by

print Summer 1998

Scott Lyall

The bluntness of the literary citation in Scott Lyall’s Washington Square, 1997, might leave viewers unfamiliar with Henry James’ 1881 novel wondering what fundamental elements they are missing. The book may be fairly common reading, but in borrowing its title, the installation can’t avoid a certain clubby tone, demanding a well-delimited “interpretive community” (to use Stanley Fish’s term). Borrowing from canonical or high—culture sources in contemporary art sometimes masks a not-so-noble attempt to confer an aura of erudition on the work in question. Yet in the eloquent text distributed

print February 1998

Kcho

“Todo Cambia” (Everything changes), a show of work from 1997 by Kcho curated by Alma Ruiz and Paul Schimmel, is a message in a bottle from a Caribbean island. The first room is filled with nearly life-size sculptures made of clay over wire armatures that take the shapes of different objects related to flotation and navigation: a raft, a kayak, a sail, a surfboard, a boat, an oar. Precarious and deteriorating, thetr surfaces thickly patterned with cracks, the sculptures emphasized their nonfunctionality, their rough craft production and the non—waterproof material of which they are fashioned.

print February 1998

“Arte/Cicade 3”

The third edition of the large-scale exhibition “Arte/Cidade 3: a cidade e suas historias” (Art/city 3: the city and its histories) included about forty Brazilian artists and designers working in different media—from newcomer photographer Patricia Azevedo to veteran architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha, musician and writer Jose Miguel Wisnik to abstract painter Carlos Vergara, and fashion photographer Willi Biondani to designer Carlos Nader. The show also featured Brazilian artists with a presence on the international art scene, such as Cildo Meireles. This eclectic, cross-generational mix was one

print January 1997

Rosângela Rennó

Rosângela Rennó is part of a younger generation of Brazilian women artists—Adriana Varejão, Beatriz Milhazes, Jac Leirner, and Valeska Soares—who have gained international recognition over the last few years. Among these, Rennó is perhaps the one who gives the greatest emphasis to social and political issues in her work.

In her MoCA focus series exhibition “Cicatriz” (Scar), Rennó juxtaposed two series of her work. The first is a selection from her Arquivo Universal (Universal archive, 1992–96), which consists of short texts, taken from newspapers and magazines, that refer to violence in

print January 1997

Artur Barrio

Although this recent retrospective of work by Artur Barrio occupied a relatively small gallery, the scale of the space did not reflect the magnitude of the work, but its nature. For the art of this Portuguese-born, Rio de Janeiro–based artist is quite difficult to showcase, spanning over a quarter of a century and consisting mostly of ephemeral works: performance pieces, installations, and public interventions. “Situacões: ARTUR BARRIO: Registro” (Situations: Artur Barrio: record), curated by local critic Marcio Doctors, comprised mainly projects and documentation of works: approximately three

print November 1996

Waltercio Caldas

It’s difficult to describe an exhibition like Waltercio Caldas’ “Anotações 1969–1996” (Annotations 1969–1996). First, there is the problem of attempting to “translate” the work of an artist that depends so much on the play of languages, visual and verbal. Second, “Anotações. . .” consisted of several dozen works (sketchbooks, drawings, objects, reproductions, texts, and a video piece), which—though for the most part small and rather simply constructed— engage complex issues. The work juxtaposes and exposes gaps between languages, the logic of the visual, the verbal and—in the case of the video

print Summer 1996

Mario Cravo Neto

Mario Cravo Neto is one of the few prominent Brazilian artists still living in his home country (many of his compatriots have set up house in Europe and North America). Based in Salvador, Bahia (a city in one of the poorest regions of Brazil, the Northeast), Cravo Neto is a master of the formal language of photography. His most recent show (the final stop of an exhibition tour which opened at the Museu da Bahia, Salvador) comprised black and white photographs that portray their subjects in strange yet balanced configurations. Luscious and slick, these images are undeniably beautiful, almost

Adriano Pedrosa