Tobi Maier

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  print January 2019

  Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

  Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s “Martian Dreams Ensemble” is the artist’s latest attempt to meld art with science fiction. Taking Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951) as sources of inspiration, Gonzalez-Foerster treats the red planet as an object of thought, while once again underscoring her desire to create immersive experiences. The artist produced the show, curated by Julia Schäfer, together with the ensemble of its title: a team comprising a graphic artist, a musician, an architect, and a diorama designer—Marie Proyart, Julien Perez, Martial Galfione,

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  print Summer 2018

  Maria Auxiliadora da Silva

  Brazil was the last Western nation to abolish slavery, in 1888, and 130 years later the Museu de Arte de São Paulo has dedicated its 2018 program to Afro Atlantic histories as part of its larger mission, adopted last year, to become “diverse, inclusive, and plural.” To inaugurate this cycle of programming, the exhibition “Maria Auxiliadora: Daily Life, Painting and Resistance” opened just after International Women’s Day in May. This exhibition, curated by Fernando Oliva and Adriano Pedrosa, revisits her work, neglected for decades because it was deemed irrelevant to the prevailing modern and

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  print March 2018

  Emiliano Di Cavalcanti

  This show of Emiliano Di Cavalcanti’s work made for an eye-opening complement to the current Tarsila do Amaral exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Both artists helped forge what would become known as Brazilian modernism. But if Amaral painted the tropical landscape and its exuberant vegetation, Di Cavalcanti (1897–1976) was interested in portraying samba and carnival, the female figure (often in groups) in the urban periphery, and the coastline with its fishermen. A member of the Brazilian Communist party, the artist was imprisoned twice for his political convictions, once during

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  print November 2017

  Roberto Winter

  Roberto Winter’s latest show, “Default,” took as its point of departure A role play, 2017, his new film work serialized over five weeks on the website aarea.co. In it, the character Joaquim K. claims to have assassinated the US president on June 28, 2017. Appropriating news footage; content from websites such as XVideos and LiveLeak, video games, corporate animations, and social media; and shots of São Paulo street scenes filmed from the artist’s studio window, Winter wove together a mockumentary on the legitimacy of violence as a form of political participation. Evoking Rupert Sanders’s Ghost

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  picks May 26, 2017

  Guilherme Vaz

  With Hélio Oiticica, Cildo Meireles, and Artur Barrio, the artist and composer Guilherme Vaz was among the four Brazilian participants in Kynaston McShine’s 1970 “Information” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A retrospective of Vaz’s work took place last year at Rio de Janeiro’s CCBB, and this venue hosts another iteration of the show. It opens with two films for which Vaz created the sound track. One, Fome de Amor (1968), is a Nelson Pereira dos Santos–directed Nouvelle Vague–era work shot in Angra dos Reis and New York, and widely considered the first Brazilian film to

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  print April 2017

  Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries

  In recent months, South Korea has seen manifold protests against President Park Geun-hye, who has been accused of mounting a bribery scheme involving her long-term friend and confidante Choi Soon-sil. The president has been impeached, and now, in fact, removed from office, yet protests continue in public squares and avenues in central Seoul. One camp will not stop rallying until Park is jailed; the other defends her, South Korean and US flags in hand, fearful of a repeated invasion from North Korea. As the crisis unfolds, high-level executives from several big corporations are under scrutiny.

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  print December 2016

  Tobias Putrih

  At first sight, “Compressões,” (Compressions), the first solo exhibition in Brazil by Boston-based Slovene artist Tobias Putrih, seemed to pay homage to the gallery’s own iconic town house, designed by Rino Levi and completed in 1959. The show featured thirteen suspended screens made from cardboard, plywood, metal, wooden clothespins, and elastic. Hung adjacent to a central pergola that created a setting for conversation, they coexisted gracefully with a beige-tiled open fireplace and a tropical garden designed by Roberto Burle Marx. The screens’ formal appearance echoed the conjunctions of

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  print November 2016

  Hudinilson Jr.

  “Zone of Tension” was the first institutional retrospective of Hudinilson Jr.’s work, and follows his untimely passing in 2013 at the age of fifty-six. It was only appropriate that the exhibition take place at the multipurpose Centro Cultural São Paulo; situated close to the artist’s former studio/apartment, the center was a regular stop on his walks through the city, and he donated many works to it over the years. Indeed, the exhibition drew works largely from the center’s collections, as well as from the holdings of the artist’s family, and it was organized by the Centro Cultural’s visual arts

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  print September 2016

  Cibelle Cavalli Bastos

  Cibelle Cavalli Bastos’s first solo exhibition in São Paulo, “Mil Maneiras de Matar um Monstro” (A Thousand Ways to Kill a Monster), opened the night before the world’s largest LGBT parade took place in the same city. Appropriately enough, it embodied the London-based Brazilian artist’s farewell to old-fashioned gender and identity conventions.

  Cavalli is a musician as well as an artist; hers was the main voice on the acclaimed 1999 album São Paulo Confessions by Suba (Mitar Subotić)—she was just twenty-one at the time it was recorded—and she has since released several albums under the

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  print April 2016

  Laercio Redondo

  “O que acaba todos os dias” (What Ends Every Day) is the first comprehensive museum exhibition dedicated to the Brazilian artist Laercio Redondo. The show, which travels to Dallas Contemporary in September, brings together works created between 1998 and 2015, all jam-packed with references to the history of art and architecture, both Brazilian and foreign. In Rio, the exhibition was framed by a pair of curtains, a blue-gray-yellow Neo-concrete geometric abstraction, made in collaboration with exhibition designer Birger Lipinski. Upon entering, the viewer encountered a slanted board, covered in

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  print February 2016

  Daniel Steegmann Mangrané

  Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s exhibition “Kingdom of all the animals and all the beasts is my name” took its cue from a particular area near Rio de Janeiro, the city where he has been based since 2004. Divided among three spaces, two lens-based works focus our attention on the tropical plant world in the Brazilian rain forest. These works are interspersed with five silk-screened and painted wall texts derived from the words of Stela do Patrocínio (1941–97), a patient who was interned for some twenty-six years at Colônia Juliano Moreira psychiatric clinic outside Rio.

  On entering the gallery, the

• previews September 2015

  “Resistance Performed: Aesthetic Strategies Under Repressive Systems in Latin America”

  In 1979, at the height of Brazil’s military dictatorship, the artist group 3nós3 (Mario Ramiro, Hudinilson Jr., and Rafael França) surreptitiously slipped plastic bags over several monuments throughout São Paulo. Around the same time, Chile’s Colectivo Acciones de Arte challenged the Pinochet regime with theatrical interventions in the streets. In Heike Munder’s survey of subversive artistic actions in Latin America, these and other episodes staged by figures such as León Ferrari, Anna Bella Geiger, and Marta Minujín are put in dialogue with works by contemporary artists