After Carnival: Exhibitions in São Paulo That Stole the Show
Exhibition view: Pol Taburet, Ode to Twisted Gods, Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo (8 February–16 March 2024). Courtesy Mendes Wood DM. Photo: Gui Gomes.
In Brazil, it is said that 'the year doesn't begin until after Carnival', with the transgressive celebrations heralding a creative gateway into the future. In São Paulo, three gallery exhibitions overlapped with Carnival, standing out as portals to an arc of artistic experimentation.
The Experimental Legacy
Galeria Millan
20 January to 24 February 2024
At Galeria Millan, works by trailblazing Grande Dames of Brazilian contemporary art Lygia Pape, Mira Schendel, Anna Maria Maiolino, and Flávia Ribeiro (Frapê) (who died in October 2023), are placed in dialogue with younger artists Elena Damiani, Guga Szabzon, and Vivian Caccuri. Together, these female artists—who have all had a relationship with Galeria Millan—shine a light on boundary-pushing creative freedom.
Anna Maria Maiolino's metal, wood, and wire sculpture Mais de 50 from the 'Preposições' series (2008/2013) and Lygia Pape's Sting Amazonino (1990) are prescient forebears of Vivian Caccuri's exploration of materiality, sound, and the dynamics between viewer and object. This is manifested in the younger artist's use of hanging keys in My Mistake II (2015) and the wall-hung stones, beads, cotton rope, and protective screen of Lava Transparente II (2023).
Elena Damiani also investigates materiality and explores continuity and interruption in the sliced marble and cylindrical copper floor sculpture Transits and Occultations III (2021). If there are echoes of Pape's cube-and-sphere iron sculpture Volante (1999) in Damiani's work, Guga Szabzon's embroidered lines on felt in Remanso (2023) and Suspense (2023) share similar interests in the relationships between line, shape, and space, also widely explored by Mira Schendel and evident in work such as Untitled (c.1964), where the word vuoto (void in Italian) is central to this monotype on rice paper.
The plurality of readings and associations across the artworks is a testament to the experimental legacies of the older artists, whose example is taken up and extended by newer generations.
Anna Maria Maiolino: To want not to want, to desire, and to fear
Galeria Luisa Strina
3 February to 16 March 2024
Anna Maria Maiolino will receive a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale (2024), titled Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere. In anticipation of this, the 65 works from the 1990s to the present on display at Galeria Luisa Strina offer a comprehensive yet concise glimpse into the vast, pulsing universe that Maiolino has established over half a century.
Italian-born Maiolino migrated early in her life to the Americas, living in several countries before settling in Brazil in 1960. The artist's questioning of how identity is shaped and the dynamics between subject and object manifest in a coherent visual lexicon that traverses painting, photography, video, drawing, and sculpture across materials as diverse as ink, paint and permanent markers, clay, cement mortar and metals, and audiovisual media.
Her prolific art practice does not follow a straightforward and obvious progression. An investigative approach is evident in artworks as the artist plays with dichotomies such as full and void, repetition and interruption, inside and outside, to breathe a holistic sense of humanity into her production.
The different series on display show a moving back and forth that stems from a common root in empirical experimentation and the exploration of the body and its role in the transformative nature of artmaking processes.
Drawings on display from the series Dropper (2016) show watered ink marks on paper that are the graphic evidence of routes taken by the hand and body that intermediated their making. Occasionally, words appear to reveal intricacies of the mark-making body's self.
Pol Taburet: Ode to Twisted Gods
Mendes Wood DM
8 February to 16 March 2024
Paris-born Pol Taburet has spent time in various parts of Brazil, including in the northeastern city of Salvador, known as a place of religious syncretism, and the megalopolis of São Paulo in the southeast, a vibrant sociocultural melting pot. The polyphony in these cities seems relevant for an artist whose work at Mendes Wood DM centres on non-affirming, hybrid subjects.
A wondrous window into an alluringly raw and surreal visual landscape, the exhibition features sculptures, paintings, an installation, and two billboard-scale photomontages. In the photomontages Home Sweet Jo I and II (2024), the cropped head of a Black person is set against a hyper-saturated abstract background, mouths agape to reveal sparkling jewels. In the middle of the gallery space, between these two works, is the grid-like, white-tiled wall installation As they Grow (2024), from which bunches of dreadlocks seem to break through like untamable wild plants or hairy tongues.
![[Left to right] Pol Taburet, Home Sweet Jo I (2024), As they Grow (2024). Exhibition view: Ode to Twisted Gods, Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo (8 February–16 March 2024).](https://files.ocula.com/anzax/Content/Features/2024/S%C3%A3o%20Paulo%20lowdown/-Home-Sweet-Jo-I-As-they-Grow_1440_0.jpg)
Such works shine a critical light on contemporary themes such as sociocultural resistance, capitalist power, and the cult of digital imagery, while the paintings and sculptures operate on a more Francis Bacon-esque level, with unsettling and phantasmagoric overtones.
The paintings depict figures with blurred faces hovering in abstracted solid-colour backgrounds, and the rough, undefinable hybrid figures found in the bronze sculptures of the 'OTTG' series (2024) don't deny the hand imprints that molded them, embodying the 'Ode to Twisted Gods' of the exhibition title. —[O]
