picks April 24, 2023

Caio Reisewitz

Caio Reisewitz’s latest exhibition “World in Between” responds to a moment in which many Western societies struggle with political polarization and demands for truly global collaboration to address issues of transnational consequence—most urgently, the environmental crisis. The artist has built his practice using photography to probe the relationship of nature, architecture, and human activity. Since the early 2000s, Reisewitz has focused much of his research on Modernist architecture in Brazil, examples of which frequently appear in his images. For this exhibition, the artist filled the common

print February 2023

Adriano Amaral

Numerous dichotomies—natural/artificial, abstract/figurative, material/immaterial, ecology/technology—were at play in Adriano Amaral’s exhibition of recent works, “Lagoa de dentro” (Inner Pond). Employing forms of the four basic elements—air, earth, fire, and water—in tandem with synthetic or industrial materials such as silicone, acrylic, and aluminum, he also combines manual and technological processes to create his works. The resulting paintings and sculptures presented here prompted the viewer to contemplate more binaries: life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness, and the transitions

print September 2022

Paulo Nazareth

“Vuadora” (Flying Kick) offered a panoramic perspective on Paulo Nazareth’s multifaceted oeuvre, with some 250 works, including photographs, installations, objects, notes, writings, and paintings, made over the past thirty-five years. The artist’s birth name is Paulo Sérgio da Silva, but the name by which the art world knows him––Paulo Nazareth—is an artwork in itself. By taking his maternal grandmother’s name, he acknowledges ancestral struggles as integral to his own identity. His grandmother was committed to a mental institution in the mid-1940s, shortly after his mother was born. A descendant

picks June 10, 2022

Ayrson Heráclito

At a time when decolonizing narratives are slowly seeping into mainstream culture, “Ayrson Heráclito: Yorùbáiano” seamlessly fuses experiential and material poetics with commentary on social, cultural, and political history. The sixty-three artworks on display—among them installations, photographs, objects, performances and videos, all from the 1990s until the present—reference the traditions and mythologies of Yoruba culture, which filtered into Brazil through the Atlantic slave trade. Heráclito hails from the northeastern state of Bahia, which received an enormous influx of enslaved Africans,

print May 2022

Jacques Douchez and Norberto Nicola

Texture, volume, and depth were fundamental characteristics of the twenty-six tapestries, hung from the ceiling and surrounded by mirrorclad walls, in “Os pássaros de fogo levantarão voo novamente. As formas tecidas de Jacques Douchez e Norberto Nicola” (The Firebirds Will Take Flight Again: The Woven Forms of Jacques Douchez and Norberto Nicola). Curated by assume vivid astro focus—a collective whose variable personnel in this case consisted only of its founder, Eli Sudbrack—the show presented the work of two artists who were business partners in the weaving studio Atelier Douchez-Nicola,

print April 2020

Alex Cerveny

Artworks by the dozens, in varying sizes and mediums, lined the walls of Casa Triângulo for “Todos os lugares” (All the Places), a retrospective covering twenty years of Alex Cerveny’s production since 1999. The artist’s incomparable style and readily recognizable visual lexicon blends text and images, while his aesthetic draws from popular (especially ex-voto) and Surrealist traditions. An avid printmaker, draftsperson, and painter who also makes collages and illustrates books, Cerveny displayed samples of the full range of his practice in the gallery’s two rooms. His images often show naked

print November 2019

Eduardo Navarro

There’s something phantasmagoric about garments hanging on display without any bodies to fill them. In the Argentinean artist Eduardo Navarro’s “Instant Weather Prediction,” white outfits hemmed in silver, resembling rudimentary three-piece space suits, were exhibited in small groups throughout Pivô’s concrete-clad exhibition spaces, which were designed by Oscar Niemeyer to complement the exterior of the institution’s home, the iconic S-shaped Copan Building in São Paulo. Navarro’s outfits were displayed spread-eagled on abstract wire mannequin-like structures; each nylon muumuu had two large

print September 2019

Tarsila do Amaral

As part of a yearlong program dedicated to the art and histories of women, the exhibition “Tarsila Popular”—with a second official title, in English, “Tarsila do Amaral: Cannibalizing Modernism”—was the Museu de Arte de São Paulo’s first retrospective of one of Brazil’s most prominent and transgressive modernists. Known by her first name, Tarsila do Amoral (1886–1973) played a trailblazing role in reshaping the Eurocentric artistic traditions that were in place in Brazil at the beginning of the twentieth century to develop a visual language capable of capturing local cultures and narratives.

print Summer 2019

Regina Parra

As a wave of conservatism sweeps the globe, among the welcome signs of resistance is the continuing spread of feminist discourses. Regina Parra’s solo show “Bacante” (Bacchante) took inspiration from Euripides’s tragedy The Bacchae to offer a perspective on feminism and the female self that is rooted in antiquity. While the play was the artist’s point of departure, her research was informed by wider studies in Greek mythology and poetry as well as nineteenth-century photographic investigations of hysteria.

A series of six oil paintings on paper, “A Perigosa” (The Dangerous One) (all works 2019),

print February 2019

Clarissa Tossin

Based in Los Angeles for the past decade, the Brazilian artist Clarissa Tossin makes sculptures and videos in which she places architecture and site at the center of investigations into exchanges that are at once cultural and economic. On first glance, Tossin’s recent show “Maya Blue”—featuring sculptures from the series “The Mayan,” 2017–18, and “Encontro das Águas” (Meeting of Waters), 2016–18—could easily have been mistaken for an unorthodox post-Minimalist display of anthropological artifacts. In New Grammar of Form #1, 2018, from the latter series, for instance, woven baskets in the style

print September 2018

Marcia de Moraes

Over the past decade, Marcia de Moraes has developed colorful, abstract drawings that explore coexistence, investigating and negotiating dichotomies such as vacuity and solidity, constriction and expansion, corporeality and abstraction, neurosis and calmness. Her use of similar recurring patterns, inspired by objects she photographs, has forged a recognizable visual lexicon that includes shapes reminiscent of abstracted tongues, teeth, eggs, leaves, vines, cylinders, cords, and spheres. This exhibition featured collages and visceral ceramic sculptures alongside her drawings, whose expansive

print April 2018

Jaime Lauriano

Brazil’s colonial past was the central theme of Jaime Lauriano’s exhibition “Assentamento” (Settlement). The title refers both to the name given to territory occupied by landless or homeless settlers and to the sacred areas designated for worship in Candomblé, a religion practiced mainly in Brazil, which draws its beliefs from various African traditions and is historically associated with slaves’ resistance.

The exhibition featured eight works, all from 2017. Trabalho (Work) was a large wall installation for which Lauriano collected found objects such as tapestries, a jigsaw puzzle, calendars,

Camila Belchior