Nara Roesler is pleased to announce Amelia Toledo's solo presentation at this year's edition of Frieze Los Angeles, on view from February 17 to 20, 2022.
Amelia Toledo (1926–2017) is a leading figure in Brazilian art in the twentieth century, with a career spanning over five decades, marked by distinctive engagements with constructive sculptural experimentations, that subsequently unfolded into iconic entwinements between art and nature.Toledo was first introduced to the field of visual arts at the end of the 1930s as she began frequenting the studio of Brazilian modernist landmark artist Anita Malfatti (1889–1964), after which she studied under the guidance of Yoshiya Takaoka (1909–1978) and Waldemar da Costa (1904–1982).
Throughout her career, Toledo made use of several media and techniques, including painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, installations, and metalsmith/jewelry design, always focusing on the use of materials and faktura. Her work was initially aligned with constructivist research, echoing notions of Neoconcretism and the characteristic preoccupations of the 1960s, with an interest for public participation, as well as for the entwinement of art and life. She developed her multifaceted oeuvre in permanent and mutually enriching interlocution with other artists of her generation including Mira Schendel, Tomie Ohtake, Hélio Oiticica, and Lygia Pape.
Her production resonates today more than ever through her continuous articulation of aesthetics and nature, ecology and form, stressing both the sophistication of design and the roughness of matter/materials.
Toledo's signature achievements are driven by her focus on nature, implying her investigations on the concept of landscape, engaging with stones and shells, among other natural elements, which she collected compulsively and included in her work. Challenged by these materials, Amelia Toledo pursued her career as both an artist and an engineer, envisaging the possibility of ecological concretism.
In her iconic series of Minas, the artist uses stones to investigate colour, brightness, transparency, and the various shapes of the Earth's 'flesh'. She was able to create compositions in which pieces collected from the dark depths of natural settings are placed in various arrangements, including dialogues with 'modern' materials, such as stainless steel. The rocks were not subject to any treatment that would change their original form, but were merely polished to reveal their internal designs, the delicate veins, revealing their temporality.
In the 1980s, after having dedicated almost twenty years to other techniques, Amelia Toledo decisively returned to painting, creating works that revealed an investigation into issues concerning support, gesture, and colour. The Horizontes series synthesises Toledo's career-long research on landscape, transposed into the pictorial field. The paintings are characterised by the use of two areas of colours, which divide the canvas space and delineated a margin. The economy of colours aims at accuracy and reaches painting at its core, at the threshold between representation and abstraction, turning to the very materiality of the medium. In these compositions, the colours are paired by proximity, not only spatial but also tonal.