GROUP EXHIBITION

Trama brings together more than ten wooden stools produced by different Indigenous peoples of the Brazilian Amazon, including the Assurini, Karajá, and Mehinako, among others from the Upper Xingu region and its surroundings. The works are from the Porangatu collection, created by Maria Feitosa Martins. ‘My family has been collecting Indigenous art for over twenty years, motivated by an interest in exploring parallels and connections between modern and contemporary art and the rich production of Indigenous artists,’ Martins notes. She developed the Porangatu collection between 2022 and 2023 with the intention of further deepening this axis within the family’s collection.

The wooden stools presented in the exhibition highlight the technical and symbolic sophistication of this ancestral production, the result of practices transmitted among different Indigenous peoples of the Amazon and its surrounding regions. Typically carved from a single tree trunk and often conceived in the form of animals, spiritual entities, or geometric structures, these works incorporate graphic patterns executed through carving, pyrography, or natural pigments—marks that express histories, cosmologies, and forms of knowledge passed down across generations.

In the daily life of these communities, stools function simultaneously as utilitarian objects and as social and ritual markers, indicating positions of leadership or serving as supports for shamanic practices. Now situated within the expanded field of art and design, these seats make visible Indigenous protagonism and reaffirm the relevance of their aesthetic repertoires in the formation of Brazilian culture, inviting viewers to reimagine—and reforest—their own imaginaries.

Within the context of proximities proposed by the exhibition, Lygia Pape’s Tecelares series emerges as a fundamental axis of dialogue. Executed as woodcuts, the works in the series stem from an exploration of the so-called ‘cut-line,’ in which incision into the wood—a physical, direct, and irreversible gesture—structures geometric compositions that tension rigor and sensibility, calculation and living matter. In the Tecelares, Neo-Concrete geometry does not assert itself as pure abstraction, but rather as the outcome of a process that responds to the grain, resistances, and accidents of the material, establishing a notion of space constructed through the body and action. It is at this point that possible parallels with the Indigenous stools are articulated: in both Pape’s prints and these ancestral objects, wood is not a mere support but an active agent of meaning; and graphic patterning, far from being decorative, constitutes a system of knowledge embodied through gesture, repetition, and transmission. In this way, the exhibition foregrounds distinct yet equally complex modes of understanding the world as a weave—one in which form, material, and experience are inextricably intertwined.

Trama further distinguishes itself by articulating three axes that recur in Gomide&Co’s curatorial program: the investigation of furniture objects from a conceptual and aesthetic perspective; the recognition of cultural and visual repertoires of Indigenous peoples; and the proposition of new readings of the work of key figures in Brazilian modern and contemporary art, particularly those associated with the Concrete and Neo-Concrete movements. As Bechelany notes, ‘the exercise of bringing together the Tecelares (1953–1960) and the Indigenous stools from the Porangatu collection does not seek synthesis or harmony between objects from such distinct cultural universes, but rather a productive friction between geometry and gesture, between modernity and ancestry, between artwork and body,’ reaffirming the critical and relational framework that structures the exhibition.