Kaira M. Cabañas

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  print April 2017

  Tamar Guimarães

  For her first solo exhibition in Spain, Tamar Guimarães presented the thirty-six-minute film La incorrupta (The Uncorrupted), 2016, which was commissioned by the Reina Sofía. In it she presents a story about a guest curator and her potential exhibition, using the very museum in which the work is screened as the film’s setting. Throughout the film—an amalgam of documentary, fiction, and essay—viewers are privy to conversations among the curator (played by the artist), museum director, and staff, in addition to confidential discussions among the latter. The exhibition’s point of departure

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  passages March 24, 2017

  Ferreira Gullar (1930–2016)

  ALTHOUGH FAMILIAR WITH HIS WORK FROM MY UNDERGRADUATE YEARS, I never had any reason to reach out to Ferreira Gullar until 2010, when I was preparing the exhibition “Specters of Artaud” for the Reina Sofía. In my research interview with him, we reviewed some well-trodden history: his Concrete poetry of the 1950s and his authorship of the 1959 “Neoconcrete Manifesto” that marked his and his cohort’s break with the rationality of Concrete poetry and visual art. Around the turn of the decade, he also penned a series of newspaper articles titled “Stages of Contemporary Art,” a programmatic and

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  print February 2017

  Hélio Oiticica

  “HÉLIO OITICICA: TO ORGANIZE DELIRIUM” was the first US exhibition in more than two decades to feature the full breadth of the Brazilian artist’s vibrant aesthetic production, from his early experiments with color and geometrically shaped supports—including his “Bólides” (Fireballs), 1963–69, “Núcleos” (Nuclei), 1960–66, and “Parangolés,” 1964–79—to his immersive environments. Among the latter was his seminal Tropicália, 1966–67, in which visitors are invited to physically engage an array of materials, from gravel and sand to poems and a TV set. The survey also marked the artist’s

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  previews January 2017

  Jonathas De Andrade

  The tension between documentary and fiction promises to define Jonathas de Andrade’s first major exhibition outside his native Brazil. In O peixe (The Fish), 2016, he filmed fishermen tenderly embracing their dying catches, forging a new ritual through labor. With O levante (The Uprising), 2012–13, de Andrade was given permission by the Recife government to film a horse-drawn-cart race of his own design in the city (where farm animals are usually prohibited), thereby bringing the reality of the country’s rural poor to this cultural center through fiction. Highlighting

• previews January 2017

  “Anita Malfatti: 100 Years of Modern Art”

  Having left Brazil in 1910 to study in Berlin and New York, Anita Malfatti gained notoriety when she returned to São Paulo seven years later on account of an exhibition of her Expressionist- and Cubist-inspired paintings. Though stridently defended by Oswald de Andrade and other writers and artists later associated with the Semana de Arte Moderna festival, her paintings incited the polemical objections of such academic critics as Monteiro Lobato, who designated modern art “abnormal,” comparing it to psychopathological art. This exhibition commemorates that

• previews September 2016

  32nd Bienal de São Paulo: “Live Uncertainty”

  How does one embrace uncertainty without succumbing to fear? This installment of the Bienal de São Paulo will offer provisional answers to the question at a time when the globe is increasingly faced with dramatic instability in the political, social, and natural worlds. Rounding up eighty-one participants from thirty-three countries, the exhibition will explore topics ranging from ecology and cosmology to collective knowledge. Following the recent trend of research-based art, many of the show’s works will

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  previews January 2016

  “The Illusive Eye: Op Art and the Americas in the 1960s”

  Celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, El Museo del Barrio (in partnership with the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires) will revisit the Museum of Modern Art’s 1965 exhibition “The Responsive Eye,” with the stated ambition of presenting the history of Op art from a Latin American perspective. The show includes some seventy paintings, sculptures, and environments produced during the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s by some fifty artists, including Julio Le Parc, Carlos Cruz-Diez, and Jesús Rafael Soto (who refused to participate in MoMA’s show) as well as several

• previews January 2016

  “Playgrounds”

  By framing contemporary artists’ work in relation to that of Lina Bo Bardi, the Museu de Arte de São Paulo aims to recover the legacies of this Brazilian architect, who designed the museum’s current home and who advocated a social vision of democracy and multiplicity. MASP recently reconstructed Bo Bardi’s iconic glass easel display for its collection, and with the title “Playgrounds,” the curators allude to the institution’s homonymous 1969 exhibition, which—as this show promises to do—took the ludic dimension of Bo Bardi’s

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  print December 2015

  Antonio Dias

  In 1977, while living in Milan, Brazilian artist Antonio Dias traveled to Nepal in search of handmade paper. Upon his arrival in Kathmandu, the country’s capital, he discovered that there were no suppliers. Thus began his search to identify local craftsmen who might assist him in the paper’s production. Yet this quasi-anthropological excursion is less important than the artist’s insistence on producing a support that would reveal its very specific materiality. In all the works in “Papéis do Nepal 1977–1986,” one could see how the handmade paper displays a certain warp and woof; how it flaunts

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  print Summer 2015

  Mathias Goeritz

  “El retorno de la serpiente. Mathias Goeritz y la invención de la arquitectura emocional” (The Return of the Snake: Mathias Goeritz and the Invention of Emotional Architecture) presented some two hundred works and documents by the German-born artist, who worked in Mexico from 1949 until his death in 1990, alongside those of many of his peers. As the title suggests, the show, curated by Francisco Reyes Palma, took Goeritz’s conception of “emotional architecture” as its theme, and so it fittingly opened with his sculpture Ataque o la serpiente del Eco (Attack or the Serpent at Eco), 1953/2014.

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  previews May 2015

  Casa 7

  In the early 1980s, Carlito Carvalhosa, Fabio Miguez, Paulo Monteiro, Rodrigo Andrade, and Nuno Ramos formed a studio collective and dubbed it Casa 7 (House 7), referring to their address in the Pinheiros neighborhood of São Paulo. The artists employed industrial house paint and craft paper to create their large-scale paintings so characteristic of that decade. Ten of these works (all from 1984–85) will be on view in this exhibition, providing a fresh angle from which to reassess their practice as part of the decade’s neo-expressionist turn. Thanks to a new documentary

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  print March 2015

  Melanie Smith

  In Melanie Smith’s recent exhibition “Fordlandia,” five paintings, eight collages, and a video (all works 2014) address an industrial complex constructed by Henry Ford in the middle of Brazil’s Amazon jungle in the late 1920s. The compound was intended not only as a site for the processing of natural rubber but also as home to a model community of producers, fostered through education and prescribed diets. In the collages on display (all Untitled), Smith pasted blueprints from the Ford Foundation’s archive of technical drawings of car parts on top of images of Amazonian flora and fauna cut out