Project Capoeira Presents:
Brazilian Day Philadelphia 2017
Part of the PECO Multicultural Series
1 PM - 7 PM
September 17, 2017
Penn's Landing, Great Plaza
Free Family Fun!
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LYDIA OKUMURA: FIVE SIDES AND OTHER DIMENSIONS
SEPTEMBER 9 — OCTOBER 7, 2017
OPENING: SEPTEMBER 9, 4:00–7:00 PM
OPENING: SEPTEMBER 9, 4:00–7:00 PM
“WITH MINIMUM INTERVENTION, I TESTED BEYOND THE REALMS OF
PHYSICAL LIMITATION AND DISCOVERED THAT GEOMETRIC LANGUAGE WAS AN INTELLIGENT
WAY TO EXPRESS SIMPLE, CLEAN, CONCISE, TRUTHFUL, HARMONIOUS, CONCEPTUAL IDEAS.
“I UNDERSTOOD IT WAS OKAY TO MAKE ART IN A
SPONTANEOUS WAY, USING THE MINIMUM NECESSARY IN ORDER TO EXPRESS AN IDEA.
FLEXIBILITY AND CLARITY OF MIND HELPS ALL THE TIME. WHEN THE WORK IS DONE, IT
RESONATES SOME KIND OF VIBRATION, WHICH YOU MAY PERCEIVE AS SPIRITUAL, INTERNAL
MUSIC. I THINK THAT AN IDEA IS AN ENERGY THAT TRANSMITS AND EXISTS IN ITS OWN.
I WANT TO EXPRESS THE IMMATERIALITY IN EVERYTHING.
“I LONG TO COMBINE THE IDEA OF DIMENSIONS—FROM
THREE-DIMENSIONAL TO FLAT SURFACES—TO MULTI-DIMENSIONS PERCEPTIBLE BY THE
MIND.”
(LYDIA OKUMURA IN “GEOMETRIC LANGUAGE, AN INTERVIEW WITH
LYDIA OKUMURA ABOUT HER NOT-SO-STRAIGHT-LINE TO ARTISTIC PROMINENCE”, BY
CYNTHIA GARCIA IN NEWCITY BRAZIL, 2017)
We are delighted to announce our first solo show by
Brazilian artist Lydia Okumura.
Lydia Okumura was born in São Paulo in 1948 to a Japanese
immigrant family.
In 1970 – inspired by the Tokyo Biennial and her readings
of the Japanese art magazine “Bijutsu Techou” – the Brazilian Okumura oriented
her work distinctly towards the international new art movements of Conceptual
Art, Minimalism and Land Art.
After the presentation of a ground-breaking installation
with the collective Equipe3 (with her artist peers Genilson Soares and
Francisco Iñarra) at the 1973 São Paulo Biennial, Lydia Okumura was granted a
4-year scholarship at the Pratt Graphics Center in New York, where she was to
live and work further on.
In the following years, Okumura exhibited some of her
most seminal multi-dimensional geometric painting and string installations –
termed “Situations” – in various galleries, institutions and collectors’ homes
in New York City, Brazil, and Japan. Okumura’s work constitutes a unique
intersection between these three geographies and their radical avant-gardes.
Since the last five years Lydia Okumura’s work receives
an impressive re-discovery in the U.S., Europe and Latin America in shows,
acquisitions and press coverage. Her first and still touring retrospective
exhibition “Situations” opened in 2016 curated by Rachel Adams at the
University Galleries in Buffalo. The show presents a prominent group of
Okumura’s early conceptual work and her pivotal painting, string and mesh
installations, alongside her exceptional oeuvre of drawings from the 1970s and
80s and her earth art pieces, first realized in 1972 in Sao Paulo.
The exhibition “Situations” elaborates for the first time
in the U.S. on the phenomenon of the intriguing simultaneity of Okumura’s work
with American Minimalists Fred Sanback, Sol Lewitt and others.
“Modern sculpture’s use of industrial materials evokes a
decidedly romantic notion of masculine middle class labor, one that artists
like Jackson Pollock and Carl Andre used to posit themselves as the artistic
“everyman.” This is why, perhaps more so than any other artistic medium,
sculpture is wrought with gendered nuances and contradictions.
“Okumura’s work presents an aesthetically tantalizing
contradiction between force and fragility. With this in mind, Okumura’s
placement within, or, rather, a critical and unjust absence from the Minimalist
movement becomes apparent. Her conceptual geometric experiments rival her
cross-national contemporaries and deserve additional critical exploration and
adulation. The visual magnificence of Okumura’s work is blinding,
effectively demolishing any remnant of gender, race or nationality.” (“Between
Force and Fragility: Lydia Okumura and the gendered nuances of Minimalist
sculpture”, by Scotti Hill, 2017)
For our gallery show FIVE SIDES AND OTHER DIMENSIONS at
BROADWAY 1602 HARLEM Lydia Okumura creates a group of even more radically
minimalized geometric installations than realized in recent shows. We see a
color reduction of blue, black and white in installations made of her signature
materials string, glass and metal. The pre-dominant shapes are the pyramid and
the cubes morphed into conceptual alteration and modulation.
The works are based on unrealized conceptual formulations
from the 1970s and continuations of sculptural projects from the 1970s and
1980s, like Okumura’s suspended mesh metal cubes, first realized at the Museu
de Arte Moderna, São Paulo for her large-scale solo
exhibition in 1984. The mesh cubes appeared in 1984, when the artist was
invited to create a large exhibition in a very short time, and the
material was made available by the museum. Lydia Okumura’s relation to material
appears in temporary conceptual manifestations. Her understanding of oeuvre is
that of a constant continuity of style of experimentation rooted in the
avant-garde initiations of her beginnings. Like in the work of Polish concept
and minimal artist Edward Krasinski, who continued throughout his life to apply
his signature device of the blue horizontal scotch tape line (outside of the dynamics
of art market affirmation of style), there is a very low sense of ‘period’ and
original materialization in Okumura’s work. Most of her installations are
“Situations”, works that get realized in one specific place at a time and
disappear after exhibition.
More than in recent shows, Okumura minimalizes in her new
gallery show FIVE SIDES AND OTHER DIMENSIONS her language to the most primary,
translucent and lightest of forms, and to an austerely reduced color shading.
The module of the pyramid appears in one of Okumura’s earliest metal and
acrylic foam sculptures Untitled (1971-72) on show, and continues in
her most recent concept for an earth art piece in the positive/negative form of
“Five Sides” (2015, first realized in a BROADWAY 1602 OUTDOOR project in
Connecticut), documented now in the ‘non-site’ of the gallery.
“The works are simple, visual, even a child can figure
them out. Walking, sitting, lying down. We think we are this body, – but
in reality we are consciousness. The visitors’ experience is a consciousness
reflecting itself almost like in a mirror, you are reflecting yourself, what
happens inside you is the experience, and that experience is also my
work.
I am just adding a little bit of information to this
world, – a moment of peacefulness where you don’t have to think about anything
else apart from what you experience in the space.” (Lydia Okumura,
conversation with Anke Kempkes, New York, August 2017)
Brazilian Latin Grammy Winner
VANESSA DA MATA
Opening Act: AS LOLAS
September 12, 2017
Showtime @ 8pm
Doors Open @ 6pm
Doors Open @ 6pm
Being a huge hit in her native Brazil. Her delicate, crystalline voice blend bossa nova rhythms with R&B, pop and reggae. A skilled composer, she got her start writing songs for Maria Bethania, Daniela Mercury and Ana Carolina, and others. Her 2007 duet with Ben Harper with the song "Good Luck" catapulted her onto the international stage, and she hasn't slowed down since, releasing five chart-topping studio albums and several number 1 hits in Brazil.
DO NOT MISS THE OPPORTUNITY TO SEE HER THIS SUMMER AT BBKINGS!!!
