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When Lives Become Form: Contemporary Brazilian Art, 1960s to the Present, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, features Brazil’s creative vitality through the works of artists, fashion designers and architects. In the 1960s, an artistic movement arose in Brazil, Tropicália, which celebrated the “originality of the culture of people who live in the tropics.” Tropicália sought to escape the shadow of the West and create a uniquely Brazilian art culture. Its central figure, Hélio Oiticica, took inspiration from Brazilian favelas, “a product of fantastic improvisation in creating a ‘vital place’ for communicating not form so much as joy.” Oiticica’s thinking has lived on continuously in many artists since that time. Such artists have attempted to reinterpret the local vernacular with reference to the context of global culture through their observations of everyday life.
When Lives Become Form includes works by Brazilian artists and creators, including internationally active Japanese Brazilians. Artists include: assume vivid astro focus, Lina Bo Bardi, Isabela Capeto, Lygia Clark, Rogério Degaki, Ronaldo Fraga, Lucia Koch, André Komatsu, Leonilson, Marepe, Cildo Meireles, Beatriz Milhazes, Vik Muniz, Jum Nakao, Ernesto Neto, Rivane Neuenschwander, Ruy Ohtake, Tomie Ohtake, Hélio Oiticica with Neville D'Almeida, osgemeos, Lygia Pape, Mira Schendel, Ana Maria Tavares and Erika Verzutti.
Curator: When Lives Become Form was originally organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and curated by Yuko Hasegawa.
RELATED
EVENTS
Tue, Nov 3, 6–8 pm: When Lives Become Form Curator's Lecture: Yuko Hasegawa • FREE First Tuesday
Thu, Nov 19, 6 pm:
Guided Tour with Director of Visual Arts Betti-Sue Hertz • FREE w/
Gallery admission
Sat, Jan 16, 2010: When Lives Become Form Scholar's Roundtable • FREE w/
gallery admission
When Lives Become Form is made possible, in part, by Consulate General of Brazil, San Francisco and Ronald W. Garrity
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By: James Im - Oct/9/2009 5:03 PM
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Rogério Degaki
Born in São Paulo in
1974. Lives and works in São Paulo.
Rogério Degaki creates
colorful Pop-like sculptures with smooth surfaces of plastic resin, finished
with automobile paint. While evoking animal characters from anime, Degaki’s works do not so much
reflect his Japanese upbringing as they do a new generation’s interpretation of
Japanese otaku culture—obsessive
fandom related to anime and manga. Besides sculptural works, Degaki
also creates oil paintings. His Rabbit
with Pumpkin-colored Ears (2007), depicting an anime-like rabbit face, and Vicky
(2006), which shows a dog wearing a hat, appear at a glance like knit works but
in fact are paintings elaborately painted in imitation of knit. In contrast to
the futuristic imagery of his sculpture series, the faces of his cute animals
radiate nostalgia and warmth.
Jum Nakao
Born in São Paulo in 1966. Lives and works in São Paulo.
Jum Nakao specialized in using digital technology, such as lasers to
produce lace, combined with exquisite craftwork to create original yet
reproducible clothing designs. His collection entitled “Sewing the Invisible”
was, according to Nakao, not a fashion collection but a collection about
fashion. Made up of delicate dresses constructed from organic paper and based
on late 19th century dress, it was shown at São Paulo Fashion Week in June 2004.
The finale consisted of the models ripping off their meticulously crafted paper
dresses, conveying implications about Nakao’s notions of fashion and serving as
a fitting final show for his career in fashion. The Musée Galliéra (the City of
Paris Museum of Fashion) offered it high praise, describing it as being the
representative show of the century, documenting it in video and book form. Since
turning away from fashion design in 2004, Nakao has expanded his repertoire to holding
exhibitions as an artist, turning his hand to stage design, and a symposium to
debate the restructuring of the Brazilian fashion system.
Rivane Neuenschwander
Born in Belo Horizonte in 1967. Lives and works in Belo Horizonte.
Rivane Neuenschwander uses substances common to a domestic setting, such
as pepper, oil, detergent, bubbles or dust as the materials for her art. Even
the meals that appear on her dining table everyday can be turned into elements for
her work. In Canteiros/ Conversations and
constructions (2006) Neuenschwander created sixteen models of modernist
buildings and structures using pasta and other foodstuffs. Each one is represented
in a single photograph with all sixteen arranged into a grid. The degradable
materials create a humorous deconstructivist criticism of the canonical status
of these buildings. The use of food is again seen in Pangea’s Diaries (2008), a stop-motion film produced over a period
of three months, in which ants move the remains of a beef carpaccio around a
white dinner plate. The evolving forms are reminiscent of the continents as
well as the geological land mass that preceded their separation. Neuenschwander
links us to nature and its daily condition in a lyrical fashion using a variety
of media from video and photography to installation. She also uses themes from
historical or social conditions in everyday life throughout her work.Ruy Ohtake
Born in São Paulo in
1938. Lives and works in São Paulo.
Ruy Ohtake, the son of
artist Tomie Ohtake, is a leading Brazilian architect known for works of bold
form and color. Ohtake’s buildings are distinguished by their use of concrete
and colorful materials and their unexpected lines and curves. His Hotel Unique
(1998), with its boat-like half-circle shape, and Instituto Tomie Ohtake
(2003), with its undulating façade, are considered his representative works.
Ohtake’s interest in color is also displayed in his plan for the renewal of São
Paulo’s Heliópolis favela, a project
launched in 2004. An endeavor to improve the entire favela, it includes such elements as a library, computer center, art
school, and movie theater. The residents themselves undertook the exterior
painting of 278 houses using color patterns designed by Ohtake. The project is
still currently underway.
Tomie Ohtake
Born in Kyoto in 1913. Lives and works in São Paulo.
Considered highly influential in the realm of contemporary Brazilian
art, Tomie Ohtake is credited, in part, with introducing the spare aesthetics
of Japan to Brazil—having emigrated from Kyoto to São Paulo in 1936. It wasn’t until
she was 39 years old that she began to study representational painting under
the Japanese artist Keisuke Sugano. Her early works were mainly landscapes but she
later turned towards abstraction in her search for more free forms. From the
late 1960s, Ohtake’s works came to be dominated by bold semicircular or split
rectangular forms, portrayed in rich brushstrokes. In her untitled works of
1968 and 2007, boldly colored geometric shapes are laid on a white ground. A comparison
of the two canvases, separated by almost four decades, displays Ohtake’s unerring
commitment to her unique abstract style, built upon the taut balance between
self-restraint and absolute freedom.
Hélio Oiticica
Born in Rio de Janeiro
in 1937. Died in Rio de Janeiro in 1980.
Hélio Oiticica was a central figure in the
Neo-Concretist movement and the founder of Tropicália. Strongly influenced by
the Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibal
Manifesto), written in 1928 by the poet and theorist Oswald de Andrade,
Oiticica strove to construct a uniquely Brazilian art. He worked to define this
new art through experimental works of art and considerable writing efforts.
Influenced by the favela culture,
especially the samba schools, he sought to integrate the body into the artwork.
Oiticica created cape-like wearable assemblies of colored cloth, called Parangolés,
and architectural structures called Penetráveis (Penetrables)
that viewers entered to experience a space of colors. The connection between
art and audience included spaces for conscious enjoyment, which evolved into Quasi-cinemas installations such as Cosmococa 1: Trashiscapes (1973).
Viewers are invited to lounge on mattresses and watch a slide projection in
which images of people from magazines, including the Spanish surrealist
filmmaker Luis Buñuel, are “painted” over with cocaine. The tools associated
with cocaine—nail files and rolled up bills—are also scattered on top of the images.
Oiticica’s use of the drug in his art coincided with his extensive writings on
the cultural effects and meanings of cocaine and put forth the idea of cocaine
as a symbol of resistance to imperialism. Through the Quasi-cinemas and other artworks, Oiticica successfully
integrated society, politics, the body, and the environment and profoundly
influenced subsequent generations of artists from Brazil and beyond.Lygia Pape
Born in Rio de Janeiro
in 1927. Died in Rio de Janeiro in 2004.
Along with Hélio
Oiticica and Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape was a prominent member of the
Neo-Concretist movement and an important figure in Brazilian art. As with these
other artists who adapted their Neo-Concrete methods to the new ideas of
Tropicália, Pape sought to integrate art into the everyday and viewer
participation was very important in her work. In Roda dos Prazeres (Wheel of
Delights) (1968) sixteen white bowls are arranged in a circle, each filled
with water of a different hue and a different flavor. Viewers are invited to
use the supplied droppers to place the water on their tongues and, essentially,
taste the different colors, thus involving multiple senses in their experience
of the work. The unexpected color/flavor combinations also awaken the viewer to
their present environment and the sensations felt at that moment. The idea of ingestion
correlates to literally taking in the art and experiencing it wholly, as well
as to concepts of anthropophagia, a
cultural cannibalism, in which one devours something and then forms a unique
connection to it.
Ana Maria Tavares
Born in Belo Horizonte
in 1958. Lives and works in São Paulo.
Ana Maria Tavares is
known for installations employing materials such as steel, glass and mirrors.
Resembling architectural structures, her installations call to mind the artificial,
emotionally vacuous atmosphere of airports, office buildings, and other forms
of urban architecture. Through her re-deployment of industrial architectural
materials, such materials lose their function, and viewers are subtly thrown
off balance in their physical experience and sense of time. Recently, Tavares
has been creating films in which steel columns connect with stairways running
in all directions. By introducing reflections she renders the space in the
films all the more complex. Airshaft (to Piranesi)
(2008) examines the realities of human circulation through anonymous urban
spaces as found all over the world. The video depicts a modern architectural
space in the manner of the complex, labyrinthine expanses depicted by the 18th
century Italian artist Piranesi, but wavering fluidly like a mirage. The chaos
of Brazil’s enormous urban spaces is reflected here. Tavares’s videos produce
an encounter with “somewhere” that is not quite “here” and make us aware of how
unreal our reality can be.
Mira Schendel
Born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1919. Died in São Paulo in 1988.
Mira Schendel fled to Brazil from Switzerland and then Italy to escape
Fascist persecution. Her Jewish background serves as an inspiration in her work
which displays a spirituality and a philosophical speculation on existence. She
admired the philosophical works of Hermann Schmitz and Jean Gebser while her
interest in Far Eastern and Dominican thought can be seen in the way she
applied extremely minimal marks to paper, hinting at a hermetic language. From
the 1960s she began drawing geometrical motifs on rice paper, eventually adding
color, and was particularly prolific between 1964 and 1966 when she produced
approximately 2,000 drawings. One series of work consisted of simple drawings on
acrylic plates suspended from the ceiling, demonstrating a will to exist while
minimizing materiality. Her work was increasingly exhibited in the U.S. and
Europe in the late 1960s through the 1970s, establishing an international
reputation for her as a conceptual artist with a unique minimal style.
Erika Verzutti
Born 1971 in São Paulo. Lives and works in São Paulo.
From her beginnings in graphic design, Verzutti was
inspired to start creating sculptures by artists such as Anna Maria Tavares,
with whom she took classes. Since then, her art has become more wide-ranging,
encompassing media such as painting and drawing, in addition to sculpture.
Verzutti's earliest three dimensional works were what she called "False
Sculptures," made from clay but painted the color of bronze. The first "False
Sculptures" were basic tower shapes but steadily metamorphosed into
dinosaurs, ducks, and swans. Verzutti used sculpture in this way to connect art
to everyday life, employing common craft material like clay and imbuing it with
the essence of traditional art materials such as bronze. Her inclusion of
organic forms in her work also ties quotidian subjects into the practice of
art-making. In 2007, she began taking casts from vegetables, creating a new
series of sculptures from the resulting shapes by combining them to produce
imaginary life forms, of which Seven
Headed Monster (2008) is an example.
Ernesto Neto
Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1964. Lives
and works in Rio de Janeiro.
Informed by Neo-Concrete
ideas about the connection between the art object and the viewer, Ernesto Neto’s
works often welcome audience participation. His sculptural pieces function as
built environments beckoning spectators to go beyond a merely visual experience,
inviting them to explore using all the senses. Employing materials such as
Lycra and Styrofoam, Neto emphasizes the tactility of his works and, in some
works, the scented spices he uses introduces the element of odor. Neto’s
constructions, with their elastic fabric outer layer suggestive of
semi-permeable membranes, evoke skin, the body, and organic forms. The effect
of gravity upon his work operates as an important unseen medium and also hints
at bodily weight. While spices are omitted from Simple and light as
a dream…the gravity don’t lie…just loves the time (2006), Neto does incorporate the
other materials for which he is known—Lycra, Styrofoam, and glass beads. The positioning
of the piece up high stresses
the gravitational pull of the pendulous extensions while the lightly colored
fabrics elicit an airy impression, thus it simultaneously imparts a light and
heavy sensation.
Yuko Hasegawa
Yuko Hasegawa is Chief Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
(MOT) since 2006, and formerly Chief Curator of 21st Century Museum of
Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, which opened to the public in October 2004.
She was Artistic Director of the 7th International Istanbul Biennial,
2001, a member of the jury for the Hugo Boss Prize, 2002, Co-Curator of
the 4th Shanghai Biennale, 2002, and commissioner of Japanese Pavilion
of 50th Venice Biennale, 2003. She has organized numerous exhibitions
including When Lives Become Form: Dialogue with the Future,
Brazil/Japan at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo,
2008, the precursor to the exhibition at YBCA, which originated at MOT.
Her most recent exhibition Rebecca Horn: Rebellion in Silence,
Dialogues between Raven and Whale is on view this fall at
MOT. Hasegawa is a professor at Tama Art University, Tokyo and has
authored books on artists Matthew Barney, Carsten Nicolai, and James
Turrell.Ronaldo Fraga
Born in Belo Horizonte in 1966. Lives and works in Belo Horizonte.
Ronaldo Fraga launched his own fashion brand in 1996. His collection
for the São Paulo Fashion Week was based on the concept of “Rute-Salomão,” a
story of the love between an orthodox Jewish man and a Christian woman. The
audacious way in which he chose to focus on ideological conflict in this way
resulted in his establishing a reputation as a cult figure within the fashion
industry. In Insensantez (How
Insensitive) (2008), Brazilian singer Fernanda Takai sings a song of the same
name, a bossa nova standard. She stands draped in a white paper dress, which Fraga
eventually illustrates with his own design. Recently Fraga has designed printed
fabrics inspired by the work of the Brazilian modernist poet, Carlos Drummond
de Andrade, the singer, Nara Leão, and clay figurines produced in the area around
the Jequitinhonha River. His intellectual references and poetic aesthetics fueled
his unique style which combines refinement with a humanist point of view.
assume vivid astro focus
Born in various parts of the world between the 20th and
21st centuries, nomads.
assume
vivid astro focus (avaf) is an artist collective, made up of two main members−Eli Sudbrack and Christope Haimade Pierson—whose cohorts change
with each project. Their activities combine different elements and according to
the character of the work, they invite designers, performers, and others to
collaborate as necessary. avaf works in a wide variety of media, including
large-scale installations and music videos. Specializing in the creation of entertaining
spaces, they combine wallpaper, panels, neon, and projections to produce works
that reflect the characteristics of the locale where they are shown. Known for
colorful psychedelic imagery, they work in a vein known as “tropical punk.” In
the spirit of anthropophagy, in which different cultures are “cannibalized” to
form a new, uniquely Brazilian culture, avaf has, in a sense, consumed a
variety of ingredients, absorbed and digested them, then converted them into
their own form of expression. Their activities are not limited to the gallery
works that they show throughout the world, but also include video podcasts,
posters, postcards, etc. that are readily available through their website. absurd vanilla anus flavor (2008) is a
brightly colored installation, incorporating music and projection, in which
viewers are invited to sit and absorb the sights and sounds, submerging
themselves in a total sensorial experience. The videos shown range from the
abstract pulsations of black and white geometric shapes to depictions of people
dancing with plastic sheets—a reference to legendary Tropicália artist Hélio
Oiticica’s Parangolés.Lina Bo Bardi
Born in Rome in 1914. Died in São Paulo in 1992.
In 1946, Lina Bo Bardi emigrated to Brazil from Italy and completed
her first architectural work, Glass House—a square glass structure supported by
thin columns—in the suburbs of Morumbi where a portion of tropical forest had
been preserved. Appearing to float in the forest, it was designed to
internalize the external environment and create a rapport with nature. Interested
in cultural anthropology, Bo Bardi carried out research in Brazil and was
immensely influenced by the local culture and state of affairs. In her most
famous work, Museu de Arte de São Paulo, she succeeded in combining an exhibition
space with a public forum. The vast concrete structure was lifted off the
ground, leaving a large open space below used to display sculpture and hold
markets or meetings, thereby transforming the spectators into active
performers. The basic concept for the building’s dynamic form is a result of
the combination of rationalism and Le Corbusier’s functionalism, but the
inspiration she received from the easygoing lifestyle of the Brazilian people was
also important. In 1964, she converted an old factory complex into a leisure
center, called SESC Pompéia, which she also helped manage. Her work reflected the
state of the country and life of its people, combining and rediscovering the
concepts of Modernism and functionalism. Her largest contribution was instigating
a discussion of architectural culture in the context of Brazil’s emerging arts
community in the mid-twentieth century.
Isabela Capeto
Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1970. Lives
and works in Rio de Janeiro.
After graduating from
Accademia di Moda in Florence, Italy in 1991, Isabela Capeto worked as a
designer for such brands as Maria Bonita and thereafter engaged in print design
for a Rio de Janeiro textile manufacturer. In 2003, she established her own
studio in Rio and, in October of the same year, began opening semiannual
showrooms in Paris. Capeto’s design work continually transgresses the border
between art and fashion. Her 2006 Summer Collection, taking the theme
“Matisse,” employed collage in re-interpreting the abstract, geometric world of
painter Henri Matisse in the realm of fashion. Colorful in appearance and
romantic in aura, her clothing designs always feature beautiful handicraft
elements, such as embroidery and attachments of antique lace. Recently, Capeto
has produced maquettes with a carnival theme and tapestries covered with beads
and spangles.
Lygia Clark
Born in Belo Horizonte
in 1920. Died in Rio de Janeiro in 1988.
A founding member of the
Neo-Concretist movement, which stressed the subjective and organic in art as
well as the active participation of the spectator, Lygia Clark dialectically
deconstructed painting as an art form. As a pioneer of interactive art, she attempted
to go beyond the narrow limits of the picture frame. In her Bichos (Animals) series from the 1960s,
viewers manipulate metal sheets (of geometric shape: triangular, square, or
circular) connected with hinges, allowing for a multitude of permutations of possible
forms, and in the process they can discover their own approach to spatial
construction. The Bichos series marked
a transition in Clark’s oeuvre from making static works on canvas and
sculptures to creating devices for discovering one’s own body and
sensibilities. This breaking down of the barriers between subject and object
was taken one step further with Caminhando
(1964) in which the viewer was invited to take a long band of paper, twist it,
and glue it into a Mobius strip, then take a pair of scissors and cut along the
length of it. According to Clark, “In being the work and the act of making the
work itself, you and it become totally indissociable.” In 1976, after returning
from Paris, where she fled in exile as a result of the oppressive military
dictatorship in Brazil, Clark focused on using objects of her own creation as
tools for art therapy.
Lucia Koch
Born in Porto Alegre in
1966. Lives and works in São Paulo.
Lucia Koch looks to the
surfaces of buildings and architectural spaces as a platform for her work in
photography and video. By introducing optical filters and lighting, she alters
the forms of a building’s compositional elements and even changes its original
function. Koch’s Olinda-Celeste (2005)
is a video work employing Portuguese azulejo wall
décor tiles she found in the historical city of Olinda. In this work, a camera
wanders across a tile wall in varying directions and at varying speeds. As the
video progresses and successive tiles of differing design appear, an illusion is
created in which the wall continues on infinitely. The camera shifts
erratically and the differing tiles appear to grow larger but then the camera
zooms out again and finally returns to the pattern of tiles shown at the onset.
Whether working in two dimensions or three, Koch introduces moving elements in
a static situation, thereby slightly altering a familiar place or scene and
causing us to re-examine our physical relationship with our environment.
André Komatsu
Born in São Paulo in
1978. Lives and works in São Paulo.
André Komatsu collects
fragments of buildings and employs them in installations, works on paper, and
performances. He brings a new perspective into the everyday reality of urban
life by drawing an image directly on a clump of concrete or a door that was
formerly a part of a standing building. In his Untitled (closet) of the series
Embutidos and Untitled (living room)
of the series Embutidos, Komatsu used cast off cabinet doors as a canvas
and inscribed the images of those selfsame cabinet doors directly on top. For
his Time = action/space (2006) (not
in the exhibition) he built a small wood hut outside an art gallery and set it
on fire, then gathered the ashes and displayed them inside the gallery.
Komatsu’s works always present images of destruction or signs of ruin. His
interest lies in time’s destructive effects on a building and the building’s
state of perpetual change.
Leonilson
Born in Fortaleza in
1957. Died in São Paulo in 1993.
Influenced by the
drawings of Eva Hesse, the graffiti art of Keith Haring, and the embroidered
images of Brazilian folk artist Arthur Bispo do Rosário,
Leonilson’s art, predominantly autobiographical, displays a hand-made simplicity
and an intimacy and expression of pure emotion. His compositions, which suggest an aerial view of points on the ground, are poetic
and musical, even romantic, in atmosphere. Animals and musical
instruments such as pianos and trombones appear in a state of suspension in his
works. Maps showing traces of his own movements also became an important theme
for Leonilson, a frequent traveler. Raised in a family that ran a fabric shop,
Leonilson had felt a deep familiarity with fabrics since childhood and he began
to employ cloth as a medium in 1989. His fabrics, cushions, and sheets, sewn
from colorful pieces of cloth and hand embroidered, cause the viewer to feel
more immediately and sensually the close relationship of cloth to the body. As
a gay artist, Leonilson was deeply aware of the prejudiced society in which he
lived and often sought to subvert the boundaries between male and female
domains, as with his work in embroidery. The discovery in 1991 that he was HIV
positive strongly impacted his art. The uncertainty and fear of death found
expression, in Leonilson’s final years, in works evoking transience and
fragility.
Marepe
Born
in Santo Antonio de Jesus in
1970. Lives and works in Santo Antonio de Jesus.
Marepe
was born and raised in Bahia, a region that has deeply absorbed Brazil’s
distinctive Afro-brazilian culture. After studying at an art school in Salvador
he returned to the village where he was born, where he continues to live and
work. Marepe’s art deeply reflected his personal experiences. His method of combining
everyday objects he found locally in Bahia and subtly altering their meaning
recalls Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, yet in Marepe’s hands such works became
endowed with the poetic sentiment and rich sensibilities of the local culture.
Many of them appear casually tossed together—a work consisting only of umbrellas
and ceramic fruits placed on a floor, a glued construction of flower vases
found at a market, or assemblies of Christmas ornaments. Marepe’s drawings,
which personify tools and carousels or produce hybrids of human beings and animals,
are highly surreal and display a grotesqueness and humor emerging directly from
his interior world. Frequently depicting a plasterer’s tools, a seller’s cart,
and other motifs related to labor and social conditions in Bahia, the drawings
reflect Marepe’s critical view of the state of the world around him.
Cildo Meireles
Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1948. Lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.
Brazil fell under military control following a coup d’état in 1964 and
every form of expression became subject to censorship in 1968 after
Institutional Act No. 5 decreed the end of civil liberties and freedom of
expression. The regulations concerning creativity and controls on ideology had
a profound effect on the activities of artists and intellectuals. From the
beginning of the 1970s, Meireles began a quiet campaign against this oppressive
regime, becoming involved in politics in a novel fashion. He worked on an
alternate currency project, in which he produced dollar bills, Zero Dollar (1978-84), which bore the
image of Uncle Sam in the center, as well as the currency of Brazil, Zero Centavo (1974-78) and Zero Cruzeiro (1974-78), bearing the
image of a native Brazilian. These banknotes appear genuine at first glance but
were produced to question the symbolic image of the countries represented by
the banknotes. For this work Meireles utilized the distribution of monetary
notes, which permeates throughout society, to transmit political messages in
the form of art, while also questioning authoritarian and capitalist societies
as symbolized by their financial systems.
Beatriz Milhazes
Born 1960 in Rio de
Janeiro. Lives and
works in Rio de Janeiro.
Since the 1980s, Milhazes has been producing
paintings incorporating colorful patterns that utilize motifs such as flowers,
plants, and decorative geometric patterns, melding Brazilian cultural imagery
with modernist references. Her vibrantly colored works are filled with
repetitions of petals from roses, dahlias, and other flowers, fine lines
intricately intertwined like lace, concentric rings of a rainbow of colors, and
circles composed of dots of differing sizes. Their energy and exuberance call
to mind the tropics and the excitement of carnival. Perhaps the defining
characteristic of Milhazes’s work is the splendid harmony created,
paradoxically, through the antagonism of shapes, such as when she produces
exquisite combinations of organic patterns comprising floral or arabesque
curves in combination with geometric patterns such as rectangles and stripes
generated by some predefined algorithm. In the second half of the 1990s she
started building motifs into dramatic patterns, resulting in paintings that
were significantly more rhythmical. More recently, Milhazes has produced
collages with materials such as product packaging and wrapping paper and
extended her range to large installations in architectural spaces, including a
subway station platform, the walls of an art museum restaurant, and a
department store façade. For YBCA, Milhazes has adapted the piece she created
for the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Maracolouco (2008).
An explosion of bright colors and vivid shapes—in a blend of geometric
abstraction and pop sensibility—covers the entire glass wall at the side of the
building, enveloping it in a carnivalesque atmosphere and making manifest the louco or crazy of the title. The vibrant
design lends a warmth and energy to YBCA’s metal and glass modernist structure.
Vik Muniz
Born 1961 in São Paulo. Lives and works in New
York.
Vik Muniz had no formal art training upon moving to
the United States in 1983, but around the end of the 1980s he began exhibiting
works produced by photographing his own recreations of well-known news photos
from Life magazine. His
three-dimensional renderings of historical events, people or famous paintings,
for which he is known, are produced from materials including string, plastic
toys, trash, and other familiar everyday objects not often associated with fine
art. These configurations are then photographed, resulting in the final piece. The
Sugar Children series (1996) are
portraits of children that Muniz met on a trip to the West Indies. Most were
from the families of sugar plantation laborers. One morning, drinking coffee
while looking at his photos of the children, Muniz recalled the ending to a
poem by Brazilian Ferreira Gullar: "It is with the bitter lives of bitter
people that I sweeten my coffee on this beautiful morning in Ipanema." Thus
his inspiration for using sugar as a medium with which to represent the
children sets up a bitter opposition between the idea of sugar as a sweet treat
and the harsh reality of the labor involved in the sugar plantations.
osgemeos
Born in São Paulo in 1974. Lives and works in São Paulo.
The identical twins, Gustavo and Octavio Pandolfo work under the name
osgemeos which means “twins” in Portuguese. Having drawn pictures together ever
since they shared a set of colored pencils and paper given to them by their
parents, they began painting graffiti on the streets of São Paulo while still
in their teens. In 1993, one of their works caught the eye of the San Francisco
muralist Barry McGee. As a result of this connection, the unique style and high
degree of finish of their mural works began to receive international attention.
The highly stylized characters that populate their works were set onto walls of
the urban landscape throughout their home city. Themes included the popular culture
of northeast Brazil, music, theatre, and nursery tales—the pictures combining
the fantasy of a dream world with reality through stylistic mechanisms similar
to anime and manga. Using paint rollers and spray cans, the rapidly produced
straight black outlines and bright colors create a decisive pop-inspired style that
developed through graffiti into their character-based paintings on canvas.
Neville D'Almeida
Born 1941 in Belo Horizonte. Lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.
Neville D'Almeida is one of Brazil’s most influential filmmakers. Having started his career studying acting both in Brazil and in the United States, he transitioned to working behind the camera and has directed and produced over 50 feature-length, short, and experimental films. He was censored by the military dictatorship in the beginning of his film career but then went on to become a popular film director with one of the top-grossing films in the history of Brazilian cinema, A Dama do Lotação (The Lady on the Bus). D’Almeida has been named as one of the leaders of the Cinema Marginal movement—concurrent with the Tropicália moment—in which themes that referred to marginal societies were explored, however, while he expresses admiration for this and other Brazilian film movements, he vehemently rejects identification with any of them. D’Almeida collaborated with Hélio Oiticica on more than 200 projects, including the Cosmococa series, which was named by the filmmaker.
Read the San Francisco Chronicle review
Read the New York Times Art Review on Os Gêmeos
Read the New York Times Profile on Os Gêmeos
The Village Voice on Os Gêmeos
When Lives Become Form at MOT
Visit Tropicália on the Web
When Lives Become Form In-Depth Exhibition Notes