Jonathas de Andrade
Eu, mestiço
March 3, 2018 - April 21, 2018
Alexander and Bonin is pleased to announce the opening of a solo exhibition of Jonathas de Andrade’s most recent work, Eu, mestiço (Me, mestizo) and Voyeristico on Saturday, March 3, 2018.
MOre information:
http://www.alexanderandbonin.com/exhibition/3946
ARTIST PAGE
Jonathas de Andrade
AFTERNOON SEMINAR WITH SEM FRONTEIRAS PRESS
March 21, 2018Time: 4:00 PM to 5:30 PMLocation: Brazilian-American Chamber of Commerce, Inc., New York, New York
This hour and a half long afterschool workshop for kids based on two children’s picture books, Stolen Spirit and Without Words, which introduces a brief overview of Brazil’s early history while encouraging young people to think about their Brazilian heritage through their personal experiences as immigrants, or as the children of immigrants. This workshop would present some general information about Brazil’s early history through a brief discussion, but it will also be interactive.
Stolen Spirit, which takes place in 1500, focuses on the arrival of the Portuguese from an Indian boy’s point of view. We can bring objects such as a sample of brazilwood to talk about how Brazil got its name and why the Portuguese were interested in this land. That would be Part I of the workshop. We would base Part II of the workshop on our book Without Words, which is about a Brazilian immigrant boy who uses his talent for draw to adapt to life in the United States. We would encourage kids or draw or to write about some personal experience they had with Brazil, and then share that memory with everyone else if they are comfortable.
More information: http://www.brazilcham.com/civicrm/event/info%3Freset%3D1%26id%3D36200
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Aipad Photography Show
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VISUAL ARTS
"Almir Mavignier: Privileged Form"
MARCH 2 - APRIL 19
MARCH 2 - APRIL 19
Nara Roesler
Galeria Nara Roesler | New York is pleased to present Almir Mavignier: Privileged Form, featuring posters by Almir da Silva Mavignier (b.1925, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil). The exhibition will also include a seminal "Kinechromatic Device" produced circa 1955 by Abraham Palatnik (b.1928, Natal, Brazil), a sculpture that employs light play to create kaleidoscopic images. Palatnik's and Mavignier's trajectories overlap, as both artists, along with critic Mário Pedrosa and artist Ivan Serpa, were united in pursuit of what Pedrosa called a "privileged form." Almir Mavignier: Privileged Form will be on view from March 2 through April 14, 2018.
The aesthetic strategies employed in Mavignier's posters to investigate form and color have long been present in his practice. His work is informed by his early experiences in Rio de Janeiro, his time in the Constructivist Ulm School in Germany led by Max Bill, and his association with Group Zero. Mavignier masterfully embodied the artistic principles expounded by these movements in his designs, a skill that led him to secure a key position as poster-maker for the 20thcentury avant-garde. The presented pieces reflect the scope of Mavignier's production and include posters made to announce exhibitions by artists, movements, and institutions such as Paul Klee, Group Zero, and the Museum of Concrete Art. The show will also highlight posters produced to publicize exhibitions by Jesús Rafael Soto and Abraham Palatnik,emphasizing the commonalities between Mavignier's practice and the formal investigation led by these artists.
Between 1946 and 1951, Mavignier led the painting studio, which he co-founded with Dr. Nise da Silveira, at the psychiatric hospital in Engenho de Dentro, Rio de Janeiro. His experience with psychiatric patients led him to recognize that an artist's "creative fantasy" comes from within. Throughout these early years, Mavignier produced his first abstract works, which were situated between geometric form and organic figuration. The artist's experience at the psychiatric hospital also drew him close to Pedrosa, Serpa, and Palatnik. Pedrosa's thesis concerning form as an object of direct experience provided a theoretical framework for the artists who surrounded him to conceptualize the patients' inherent artistic potential, witnessed at Engenho de Dentro. During this period, Palatnik produced his first prototype for a Kinechromatic Device, which projected sequential patterns of colored light onto a semi-translucent screen. The piece in the exhibition, Untitled (c. 1955), is one of the artist's early attempts to control these patterns with a hand-turned knob, a process that later, in the 1960s, became automatic. As art historian Dr. Michael Asbury points out, "The mechanical character of the work combined with the association with his colleagues posits those early experiences at the psychiatric hospital firmly withinthe Brazilian constructive tradition, or so it seems."
The late 1940s and early 1950s marked the dawn of the Concrete age in Brazilian art, a transition largely marked by Max Bill's first exhibition in São Paulo. As the Concrete poet and art critic Ferreira Gullar explains, "The end of the [Second World War] aroused a wave of optimism and renewal, which was reflected in the arts. The Max Bill exhibit in São Paulo, in 1949, created the first connection with the Ulm group, the heir
of some ideas from Bauhaus…"2 Bill, who would later become Mavignier's teacher, put forward the idea of beauty as product of mathematical form. The Ulm artists he led sought to replace naturalist reproduction by pursuing a fundamental understanding of the structures that surround us, focusing on point, line, and plane. Contact with Bill's practice shifted Mavignier's perspective on the representation of form. As the artist states, "I began to research forms and I began this non-naturalistic painting … a new world opened to us, so we were free."
Mavignier began his poster production in 1953 while studying under Bill at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm (Ulm School of Design), and incorporated his newfound freedom into his designs. Toward the end of the 1950s the artist's posters took on a quality that he describes as "modular." These designs employed repetition to transform compositional and chromatic elements into mathematical constants. From 1960 onward, the artist continued to explore structured repetition through his "additive posters," each designed to be presented next to a print of itself, establishing a repetitive and continuous design. His handling of color also reveals the influence of Josef Albers, who lectured at the Ulm School from1953 to 1954. Mavignier's consequent focus on the relationship between colors is particularly noticeable in posters that employ typography in colors that, from afar, cause the words to seemingly coalesce with the background. As a result, theposters perform their informative function by captivating the viewer through a play of color and form.
Mavignier remained in the Ulm School until 1958, the same year he first exhibited with Group Zero, in Düsseldorf, Germany. The group united over the rejection of gestural abstraction trending in Europe at the time, and sought to employ simple colors and serial structures to approach a forward-looking minimal aesthetic. To that end, Mavignier developed a series of paintings that presented patterns of colored paint droplets with pointed tips. The movement's focus on light and space was also consistent with Mavignier's concern with the optical elements that mediate the relationship between observer and artwork. In the creation of his posters, he generates a perceptual response in the viewer's eye by combining contrasting color elements with geometric forms. Not only did Mavignier adopt the aesthetic principles put forward by the group, but he also produced posters for fellow artists in the Zero network, such as Jesús Rafael Soto. Mavignier's attention to color and form accentuates the work by the Venezuelan artist, whose practice focused on the perception of movement. Through his involvement in important art historical junctures, Mavignier's art anddesign became not only suffused with the most innovative ideas of his time, but also a relic of the post-war avant-garde.
This exhibition was developed in collaboration with the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), and Galeria Nara Roesler would like to thank ISLAA for making its historically significant collection of 40 posters available for the exhibition. ISLAA is a New York-based non-profit 501(c)(3) philanthropic organization dedicated to the support of advanced research on the arts from Latin America through the promotion of lectures, symposia, publications, and exhibitions.
More information:
VISUAL ARTS
Bruno Miguel at "VOLTA NY" - Gallery Sapar Contemporary
MARCH 7 - 11 Pier 90 (Manhattan)
Bruno Miguel (b. 1981) lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. An inveterate collector of quotidian objects, Miguel’s practice explores the fluid relationships and personal stories embedded in familiar household items and consumer products to reframe the international dimensions of Pop Art and the avant-garde in Brazil. Miguel’s paintings and installations — which frequently manipulate traditional Carnival techniques in polyurethane foam, resin, and papier mache — convey the layered histories of Rio de Janeiro's landscape from a critical periphery.
He has had individual institutional exhibitions at Largo das Artes (2010), Museum Paço Imperial, Rio de Janeiro (2016), Centro Cultural da Caixa Econômica Federal, and Centro Cultural São Paulo (2016). His work was included in multiple editions of the Biennial of La Paz, Bolivia. In 2007, Miguel received an honorary mention at the V International Biennial of Art SIART in La Paz, Bolivia, followed by a fellowship from the Furnas Social-cultural for Artistic Talents. His work was included in group exhibitions at the Cultural Center Bank of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (2008 and 2009); Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago, Chile (2010); Caixa Cultural, Rio de Janeiro (2011); Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro (MAM-RJ, 2012); Hélio Oiticica Art Center, Rio de Janeiro (2012); Museum of the Republic, Rio de Janeiro (2013); and Museum of Art, Rio de Janeiro (MAR-RJ, 2014).
Miguel graduated in Fine Arts and Painting from the the School of Visual Arts, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Currently, he teaches art and art theory at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and at the School of Visual Arts, Parque Lage. He also curates Mais Pintura, a project and publication series dedicated to the emerging generation of Brazilian painters.
Miguel’s artworks investigate the fluid narratives between past and present, high and low, and domestic and professional space. In his large series Essas Pessoas na Sala de Jantar (Those People In the Dining Room) (2012–2015), Miguel creates an immersive environment of individual fantastical trees and sinuous mountains from which porcelain plates, cups, and saucers emerge only to be readily consumed and devoured. His use of starkly bright colors and traditional techniques and materials from carnival, including polyurethane foam, papier mache, resin, and spray paint, emphasize the work’s ephemeral and sardonic nature. An ornamental confection fusing porcelain tea sets and garish foam, Essas Pessoas evokes a baroque yet atrophied landscape continually regurgitating its history. In contrast, a related series A Cristaleira (Cabinet) (2015) recalls the luxury crystal carefully stored in a hutch or china cabinet, but the amorphous assemblages of stacked glasses, vessels, and molds filled with vivid resins collapse their precious provenance. On a grandeur scale, Fé (Faith) from the series Sala de Jantar (Dining Room) (2013) manipulates the material surfaces of his varied collection of antique porcelain and earthenware for a gestural tension between abstraction and planarity. Through the conflation of personal and popular artifacts, Miguel reflects a nostalgic vision of his universe that rests uneasily on the edge of painting.
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