Galeria Nara Roesler is delighted to share a solo presentation by Brazilian artist Brígida Baltar on Frieze London's current edition. The selection aims to grasp the artist's multi-disciplinary practice, which includes performative actions, sculptures, works on paper, and embroideries, offering a delve into Baltar's cohesive investigation on matters of transience, intimacy, body and shelter. The presentation begins with works from the 1990s, when the artist undertook a series of small poetic gestures from her own home, followed by pieces that demonstrate how her investigations slowly expanded to the outdoor, distinctively engaging with nature's ephemerality, finally arriving at Baltar's most recent experimentations with notions of chimerism and of the passing of time. Ultimately, the selection seeks to foreground the multi-faceted, yet highly congruous nature of the artist's practice through representative elements within her artistic journey.
Brígida Baltar began her career in the early 1990s with performances characterised by small and intimate gestures. The artist carried out her work inside her home, which doubled as her studio, always confining her acts to a space she had a deep relationship with. Baltar’s performances were documented and accompanied by photographs, videos, drawings, sculptures, and installations, always exploring issues from her own life and experimenting with the relationship between the body and space, and the body as a space. Most recently, the artist has been studying these same themes through manual work, such as embroidery, in which the surface of the fabric usually refers to her own skin, and ceramic sculptures, where she seeks to establish a connection between bodily forms and the earth.
Her work has been included in numerous exhibitions worldwide including: Neither-nor: Abstract Landscapes, Portraits and Still Lives, Terra-Art Project, London, UK (2017); the 10th Bienal do Mercosul, Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil (2015); Cruzamentos: Contemporary Art in Brazil, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, USA (2014); and The Peripatetic School: Itinerant Drawing from Latin America, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Middlesbrough, UK (2011). Baltar’s work is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, USA; Colección Isabel y Agustín Coppel, Mexico City, Mexico; Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Middlesbrough, UK; Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, SP, Brazil; Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo, SP, Brazil; among others.