Curated by Veronica Stigger

Despite being one of the most internationally successful Brazilian artists of the first half of the twentieth century, Maria Martins was not as warmly received in her home country as she was overseas. This is due in large part to her affiliation with Surrealism, a movement whose prestige waned in the postwar years as abstraction and Constructivist tendencies came to dominate the Brazilian avant-garde debate. Today, it is often the eroticism or putative exoticism of her work that garners attention—associations only reinforced by her role as the model for the figure in Duchamp’s Étant donnés. (She was also the first owner of her friend Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie and instrumental in establishing the São Paulo Bienal.) Bringing together approximately seventy works, including the sinuously biomorphic sculpture for which she is best known, as well as her drawings, paintings, and art criticism, “Metamorphoses” aims to advance a far richer conception of Martins’s practice.

— Sérgio Martins