Rubem Ludolf, Untitled, 2004
Oil on canvas
80 x 100 cm

Considered one of the top names in Brazilian neoconcretism, painter, architect and landscaper Rubem Ludolf died aged 78 on Monday, July 26, in Rio de Janeiro. Victim of an aneurysm in the aorta, the artist was admitted for ten days in the Samaritan Hospital.

Self-taught in the early career in the mid-1950s, Ludolf was a student of Ivan Serpa Free Course in Painting from the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro (MAM-RJ). Along with Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape and Aluisio Coal, he joined the Grupo Frente, looking for creative freedom and experimentation in different languages of geometry and colors. With the group, attended the 3rd International Biennial of Sao Paulo in 1955, returning to the show in five editions between 1959 and 1973, receiving the Purchase Award in 1967.

Among his most recent exhibitions are individual in the National Museum of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro in 2002, the gallery Berenice Arvan, in Sao Paulo in 2005. In early 2010, the Caixa Cultural do Rio de Janeiro had a retrospective celebrating 60 years of career Ludolf.

On account of death, the exhibition “Dialogues” opened in the presence of the artist on the last day on June 9 Gabinete de Arte Raquel Arnaud (SP), was extended until July 31. (source: UOL)

Paul Henry Ramirez, BLACKOUT (installation view), 2010
Mural, paintings, relief, furniture & lighting
A Centennial Commission, Newark Museum, NJ
Photograph by Raymond Adams

Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Reception 6-7pm, Program 7-8pm

Free, pre-registration required.
Call 973.596.6550 or e-mail: rsvp@newarkmuseum.org

Newark Museum
Billy Johnson Auditorium
49 Washington Street
Newark, NJ 07102
www.newarkmuseum.org
directions

Matthew Deleget will moderate a discussion with an international group of contemporary artists including Lenora de Barros, Paul Henry Ramirez and Don Voisine. The artists will talk about the legacy of constructivist abstract art as it relates to their work and explore why abstraction continues to be a vital mode of expression.

This panel discussion is presented in honor of Elizabeth Brady Richards.

Matthew Deleget is an abstract artist, curator and writer. He is the director of MINUS SPACE, a gallery and web site project devoted to reductive art in Brooklyn, New York.

Lenora de Barros is a poet and visual artist based in São Paulo, Brazil, whose work includes video, poetic performance, photography and sound installation. Having exhibited throughout Brazil and abroad, she is interested in exploring the abstract visual, aural and material signs of language.

Paul Henry Ramirez is a US artist noted for his signature style of fleshy and pop-inspired abstraction. BLACKOUT: A Centennial Commission by Paul Henry Ramirez is a site-specific installation in which he has transformed the Newark Museum’s Charles Engelhard Court with abstract, biomorphic forms and playful, bold color.

Don Voisine is an abstract painter based in Brooklyn, New York. President of the New York-based American Abstract Artists group that was founded in 1936, he works with a visual vocabulary of pared-down geometric form to explore the possibilities of visual space within abstraction.

RELATED EXHIBITIONS
On view through 05.23.2010

Constructive Spirit
Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s – 50s
Constructive Spirit investigates the formative geometric abstract art movements of Argentina, Brazil, the United States, Uruguay and Venezuela. This exhibition is the first to explore the conceptual connections and exchanges that existed between abstract artists from South and North America. Featured are more than 90 paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs, drawings and films drawn from the collection of the Newark Museum, along with loans from public and private collections and galleries across both continents. Artists include Alexander Calder, Joaquín Torres-García, Alejandro Otero, Gyula Kosice, Lygia Clark, Ellsworth Kelly, Geraldo de Barros and many others.

BLACKOUT
A Centennial Commission by Paul Henry Ramirez BLACKOUT: A Centennial Commission by Paul Henry Ramirez is a site-specific installation that allows viewers to experience painting as an environment that one can enter. Using the Newark Museum’s Charles Engelhard Court as his canvas, Ramirez employs his signature curvaceous biomorphic forms amidst a profusion of pop-inspired colors in dialogue with the Court’s distinctive Beaux-Arts architecture. BLACKOUT is the fourth and final commissioned project initiated to celebrate the Museum’s Centennial year.

For more information, please visit www.newarkmuseum.org.

Waltercio Caldas, Installation view of Dinamo (detail) and Shade

March 6 – April 24, 2010

The Christopher Grimes Gallery presents new work by Brazilian artist, Waltercio Caldas. Since his last solo exhibition at the Christopher Grimes Gallery in 2005, Caldas has had solo exhibitions at premier international institutions, including the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Spain, and the Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal. In 2007, he was included in Robert Storr’s exhibition, ‘Think with the Senses – Feel with the Mind. Art in the Present Tense’ during the 52nd Venice Biennale.

Caldas is widely considered to be one of the most important Brazilian artists working today. Inspired by geometric abstraction and working in a diverse array of materials – each situation determining the media – Caldas’ work articulates the tenuous relationship between the architectural space and those who occupy it. From a distance, one sees an abstract pattern of lines intersecting areas of color. However, upon closer inspection, one discovers that the lines are not as rigid as they first appeared – swaying slightly with the air current in the room. These materials allow him to sculpt the surrounding negative space. In the words of one critic: “The work insists persistently upon being a border. It further insists upon reducing the border it is. It wants to erase its outlines, its very constitution.”

In a similar fashion, the artists’ drawings and stainless steel wall constructions explore ideas of experience and perception within a formal dialogue by using thread to lead the eye from one point to another. They allude to perspective space that is not wholly present creating, what Caldas says is “a maximum presence from the least amount of material.”

Waltercio Caldas lives and works in Rio de Janeiro and has shown extensively internationally since the 1960’s. He has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, Museum of Art, São Paulo, and Centre D’Art Contemporain, Geneva, among many others, and also represented Brazil in the 47th Venice Biennale and Documenta IX. Forthcoming solo exhibitions include the Blanton Art Museum, Texas and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia.

His work is included in numerous permanent collections; some of which include the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Staaliche Museen, Kassel, the Chase Manhattan Collection and the Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo.

February 7 – April 11, 2010

For the 100th birthday of the philosopher Max Bense, ZKM will present an exhibition showing his international impact on the fine arts and literature, which can be compared to that of Umberto Eco and Marshall McLuhan. The exhibition, which carries forth the ZKM series “Philosophy and Art,” presents Bense as poet and author, scholar of the arts and literature, as well as exhibition curator and publicist.

Bense, who was active in Stuttgart from 1949 until his death in 1990, propagated an aesthetic of “technical existence” in Germany of the post-war era, which antedated by decades the media-theoretical turn in literature and the humanities that occurred in the 1980s. His thoughts on literature and art were part of a comprehensive philosophical picture of the world that showed a natural-science and “technical reality” of civilization and was aimed against German post-war culture’s romantic and mythologizing trends. Already back then, Bense established a concept of culture that—in the Enlightenment tradition—included the intellectual history of mathematics, physics, and engineering.

Max Bense, who was born on 7 February 1910 in Strassbourg, studied physics, mathematics, mineralogy, geology, and philosophy at the universities of Bonn and Cologne, and received his PhD in 1937 with a thesis on “Quantum mechanics and existential relativity.” He first worked as a physicist for I.G. Farben in Leverkusen. After his war duties, Bense pursued an invitation from the University of Jena. But he already fled to West Germany in 1948 and was appointed first as visiting professor in 1949 and then as professor of philosophy and the philosophy of science in 1950 at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart. He also taught at the HfG Ulm, the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, and in Rio de Janeiro.

Bense began pursuing his literary and artistic tendencies as publicist and radio playwright during his studies. In Stuttgart, he also began to organize exhibitions, first at the Galerie Gänsheide beginning in 1957, then at the study galleries he founded at the Technischen Hochschule Stuttgart. He wrote about numerous fine artists and poets, among others, about Max Bill, Lygia Clark, Alberto Giacometti, Almir Mavignier, Henri Michaux, Mira Schendel, and Paul Wunderlich as well as Alfred Andersch, Haroldo de Campos, Reinhard Döhl, Eugen Gomringer, Francis Ponge, Nathalie Sarraute, and Gertrude Stein. In addition to his exhibitions and essays, Bense also created other forums for the arts: i.e., by founding the magazine “Augenblick” (1955) and “reihe rot,” 1960, which he and Elisabeth Walther edited, which published, among others Helmut Heissenbüttel, Ernst Jandl, Friederike Mayröcker, and Diter Rot. At the same time, beginning with semiotics and news technology, beginning in the mid-1950s he developed an “information aesthetics” that influenced concrete and kinetic artists throughout Europe and made him one of the seminal theorists of the pioneering era of European computer art.

The exhibition with publications by Max Bense and prints, paintings, and sculptures by artists that were important to Max Bense, or were influenced by him, is supplemented with manuscripts and photos, as well as recordings of his radio plays and television appearances. They show the philosopher and his view of “art in an artificial world” (1956).

Artists in the exhibition:
Kurd Alsleben, Max Bill, Hannelore Busse, Pierre Charbonnier, Lygia Clark, Waldemar Cordeiro, Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, Reinhard Döhl, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Pierre Garnier, Bruno Giorgi, Matthias Goeritz, Eugen Gomringer, Ludwig Harig, Helmut Heißenbüttel, Josef Hirsal, Oskar Holweck, Hugo Jamin, Ernst Jandl, Hiroshi Kawano, Reinhold Köhler, Harry Kramer, Kurt Kranz, Theo Lutz, Aloisio Magalhaes, Georges Mathieu, Almir Mavignier, Hansjörg Meyer, Henri Michaux, Manfred Mohr, François Morellet, Frieder Nake, Georg Nees, Günter Neusel, Heinz Pfahler, Décio Pignatari, Uli Pohl, Francis Ponge, Diter Rot, Bernhard Sandfort, Mira Schendel, Anton Stankowski, Karel Trinkewitz, Timm Ulrichs, Gerhard von Graevenitz, Oswald Wiener, Emmett Williams, Wols, Paul Wunderlich, and Dolf Zillmann

Curated by Margit Rosen, Jens Lutz, Miriam Stürner, and Peter Weibel

Helio Oiticica
Vermelho cortando o branco, 1958
Oil on canvas, 52 x 60 cm
The Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art
at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston & Projeto Helio Oiticica

November 19, 2009 – February 21, 2010

Haus Konstruktiv completes its exhibition programme for 2009 with the presentation of one of the most significant collections of Brazilian Concrete-Constructive art: “Dimensions of Constructive Art in Brazil” showcases for the first time in Europe “The Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston”. Although individual works from Mr. Adolpho Leirner (born, 1935 in São Paulo) have been shown frequently in the past years, this will be the first time the entire Adolpho Leirner collection is exhibited outside of Brazil or the United States. The exhibition is organized in cooperation with the MFAH, which owns the Adolpho Leirner collection since 2007.

The Leirner Collection comprehensively documents how starting in the early 1950s, artists from the Brazilian avant-garde assimilated and contested the tenets of international Con-structivism, developing a unique Concrete-Constructive art. “Collecting is like a love affair. It means making discoveries in a huge game of hide-and-seek. Each and every one of these discoveries represents an important part of my life,” says the passionate collector Leirner. Painstakingly assembled since the late 1950s, the collection includes works that trace the beginnings of non-figurative art by artists such as Cícero Dias (1907–2003) and Samson Flexor (1907–1971), as well as works by members of “Grupo ruptura”, “Grupo frente” and Neo-Concretismo in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, respectively. The latter of which include such artists as Lygia Clark (1920–1988) and Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980), rediscovered in recent years by the international art world and honoured with large solo exhibitions.

“Dimensions of Constructive Art in Brazil” will enable a broad public to gain fascinating and informative insights into the development of Concrete-Constructive art in Brazil, while sim-ultaneously revealing so far little-known cross-connections and artistic dialogues with Swiss concrete art.

The exhibition directly ties in with Haus Konstruktiv’s incorporation of art history initiated with the grand jubilee exhibition “max bill 100″ (winter 2008/09): the reconstruction of the first Bill retrospective from 1951 in São Paulo already showed how the artistic exchange between concrete artists working in Europe and Brazil intensified from the 1950s onwards with Max Bill as a central figure.

Accompanying the exhibition, is the major publication Building on a Construct: The Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art at the MFAH. Edited by Héctor Olea and Mari Carmen Ramírez of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (distributed by Yale University Press), the volume assesses the research of avant-garde artists and groups of Concrete and Neoconcrete tendencies in post-War Brazilian art, and generates updated frameworks and new lines of investigation for the interpretation of these interrelated ten-dencies. It comprises of thirteen essays that were commissioned by a group of distinguis-hed artists, critics, and scholars from Brazil and the United States. The publication was designed by the noted Brazilian designer and artist Alexandre Wollner.

Helio Oiticica, Metaesquema 167, 1956
Gouache on board, 16 x 16 1/8 inches

December 17 – February 6, 2010

Drawings, 1954–58 brings together over twenty rare works by the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980), a pioneer in Modernism and multi-disciplinary practice whose works-on-paper have not yet been exhibited independently. The exhibition features works from the artist’s three major drawing series: Grupo Frente, Sêco, and Metaesquema. Hélio Oiticica: Drawings, 1954–58 will be on view at Galerie Lelong from December 17, 2009, to February 6, 2010.

Oiticica’s works form a bridge between painting and sculpture; furthermore, they connect the Modernist utopia of the 1950s with the more fractured period of social and political tensions of the 1960s and ’70s. His revolutionary performances, sculptures, and installations—-most notably, the series Parangolé, Bilateral, Relevo Espacial (Spatial Relief), Bólide, and Penetrável (Penetrable)—-outline a cohesive, sustained investigation of color and abstraction as a framework for spatial experience. The delineation of architecture in two dimensions is most visible in his drawings.

From 1955 to 1956, Oiticica was associated with Grupo Frente, a group of avant-garde artists including Ivan Serpa, Lygia Clark, and Lygia Pape. Though Oiticica was still a teenager and the youngest member of the group, his Grupo Frente drawings demonstrated an intuitive response to color matched with rigorous discipline-—a distinctiveness that would remain until his last works. The Sêcos (1956–57) establish Oiticica’s engagement with space as structure; in these he used color more economically, concentrating on symmetry and asymmetry. Years later, Oiticica’s Penetrables would make tangible the spatial relationships that are hinted at in the drawings. In the Metaesquemas (1957–58), with which viewers may be most familiar, he layers color in sharp precision, suspending the forms in a space that is perceived beyond the drawings’ borders.

The timing of the exhibition is made poignant by a tragic event: on October 17, 2009, a fire broke out at the Projeto Hélio Oiticica in Rio de Janeiro, including the storage facility where Oiticica’s works were kept. Though initial reports of the damages were devastating, it has since been deemed that a number of works can be restored. Hélio Oiticica: Drawings, 1954–58 allows the public unique access to the visionary basis of Oiticica’s groundbreaking work.

February 17 – May 23, 2010

The first exhibition to bring together South American and US geometric abstraction, Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s-50s features more than 90 works by 70 artists from Argentina, Brazil, the United States, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Constructive Spirit examines the connections, both conceptual and personal, among abstract artists, suggesting parallels that cut across time, national borders, and a range of media, including paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs, drawings and films. Featured artists include Alexander Calder, Joaquín Torres-García, Jesús Rafael Soto, Gyula Kosice, Lygia Clark, Ellsworth Kelly, Geraldo de Barros and many others.

Constructive Spirit includes many never-before-seen works from the Newark Museum’s preeminent collection of US art, as well as major loans from acclaimed private and public collections and galleries across both continents.

Complementing the exhibition are related programs and events. On Saturday, April 10 from 10 am to 5 pm the Newark Museum and the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros will present an international symposium that will offer new perspectives on South American and US abstract artists including John Ferren, Juan Melé, Charles Biederman, Gego, Josef Albers and Lygia Pape. Other related programs include a lecture series, gallery talks and family events. For information, click here.

Constructive Spirit: Abstract Art in South and North America, 1920s-50s is accompanied by a major publication of the same name that will be available February 2010 at the Newark Museum Shop. Fully illustrated and co-published by Pomegranate Press, it features seven essays that place North and South American abstraction in dialogue. Authors include Karen A. Bearor, Tricia Laughlin Bloom, Aliza Edelman, Adele Nelson, Mary Kate O’Hare and Cecilia de Torres. The 196-page publication will be available in hardcover for $39.95. Call 973-596-6696 to pre-order your copy today.

Photo: O Globo

From ArtForum.com
O Globo’s Eduardo Fradkin reports that more than a thousand works by Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica (1937–1980) were destroyed Friday in a fire at the house of his brother, César Oiticica, in Rio de Janeiro. His brother was responsible for the artist’s collection; he estimates that 90 percent of the collection he held was lost. In 2007, the Tate Modern and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston staged major exhibitions of Oiticica’s work. The fire also destroyed all the pictures and film negatives in the house made by José Oiticica, Helio and César’s father and an important Brazilian photographer.

From Wikipedia
On October 16, 2009, a fire destroyed about two thousand works by the artist – about 90% of the whole collection that was held at the residence of his brother César Oiticica in the neighborhood of the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden. In addition to paintings and the famous “Parangoles”, the artist’s archive material including drawings, notes, documentaries and books were stored in the collection. “I wanted to die together with the works. After the death of Hélio in 1980, I was responsible for the collection. It is very sad! I have no doubt, the only victim of this terrible fire was the Brazilian Culture,” said Cesar Oiticica. The fire took three hours to bring under control. Key works such as Bólides and Parangolés, including some shown at the 2007 Tate retrospective, were lost. The cause of the fire is unknown. The building was equipped with fire alarms and other safety systems. Brazilian Tourism Minister, Jandira Feghali, called for an investigation into the causes of the fire and whether any works can be recovered. The works were stored in Cesar Oiticica’s house following a dispute over money and the adequacy of storage facilities at the Centro Municipal de Arte Hélio Oiticica. The works were uninsured due to the cost. Cesar Oiticica later discussed the possibility of reconstructing some of the works but ruled out reconstruction of the Parangolés.

From O Globo (translated using Google Translate)
RIO – A fire at the family home of artist, painter and sculptor Helio Oiticica late on this Friday, the Botanical Garden, South Zone, destroyed 90% of the collection of works of art from the artist, one of the founders of the movement neoconcretist. According to the architect Cesar Oiticica, 70, brother of Helio, about two thousand pieces of the artist, who died in the 1980s, were burned, a loss estimated at U.S. $ 200 million. No one was injured, but the cause of the fire are still unknown.

Municipal Secretary of Culture, Jandira Feghali, laments the destruction of works. According to Caesar, the fire started around 22h. He said he dined with woman and a group of friends when he felt a strong smell of burning. Fire Humaitá the barracks were called to extinguish the flames. Shaken, Caesar said that 90% of the collection of the brother – estimated at 200 million dollars – was destroyed by fire.

What is the justification that we find a tragedy like this? Regretted architect. It was the greatest tragedy that could happen to the Brazilian culture. Without doubt, the only victim of this tragedy was the Brazilian culture.

The architect, however, ruled out an arson. According César Oiticica, the studio had control of humidity and temperature maintenance works, and present alarms and anti-fire. Lieutenant Corps
Yuri Manso Firefighters said the flames consumed the works quickly. Also according to the official, only a technical opinion is that you can discover the cause of the fire.

According to César Oiticica, the works were destroyed by fire tables documentaries and books. Works established as Bólides and Parangolés – the first manifestation environmental conference involving covers, tents, banners and Mangueira samba dancers, the show Opinion 65 – were also destroyed. Only saved the jobs that were stored on CDs and computer in the house. All photographic collection of the artist’s father, the renowned José Oiticica Filho, also would have been lost in the fire.

Considered one of the most revolutionary artists of his time, Hélio Oiticica born in Rio de Janeiro in July 1937. He died in March 1980, after suffer a stroke. Along with names like Lygia Clark, Amilcar de Castro and Ferreira Gullar, Helio neoconcretist participated in the movement and had works exhibited in internationally.

Among his best known works are the Parangolés (sort of covers colorful art to be worn) and penetrable (facilities). He is the author of the known phrase “Seja marginal, be a hero,” he wrote in a banner over a picture of a dealer killed a newspaper published in Rio in 1968 during the dictatorship, and was a major underlying the Tropicalia movement with his work “Tropicalia.”

The artist lived in New From 1970 to 1978, Oiticica lived in New York, where Information participated in the fair, held at MoMA (Museum of Modern Art).  In 1981, a year after his death – on March 22, 1980 – was created in Rio de January Project Hélio Oiticica, to preserve the artist’s work. The Secretariat City of Culture created the River Arts Center Hélio Oiticica in 1996.

For the director of the Bolsa de Arte do Rio de Janeiro, Jones Bergamin, the greatest legacy of
Oiticica were his projects and notes. - The problem is that his works are scattered in private collections and museums around the world, but their designs were all here. The artistic value is much larger than the financial. It is an incalculable loss – said in Bergamin interview Globonews.

Cildo Meireles, Red Shift I: Impregnation (detail) 1967-1984
Collection Inhotim Centro de Arte Contemporanea,
Minas Gerais, Brazil

July 4, 2009 – January 10, 2010

The Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MuAC) is pleased to announce the opening of Cildo Meireles, the first extensive presentation of the artist’s work, both in Europe and America.

The MuAC, which is located within the Cultural Center of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, will be the only venue in America to host this major survey of Cildo Meireles’ work, a unique event that should place Mexico as a major destination for the contemporary art scene during the next few months.

The Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles (b. 1948) is widely recognized as one of the leaders in the international development of conceptual art. Revealing how he is particularly fascinated by scale, the works range from an object in the form of a small ring to an installation covering 225 square meters, while also bringing together several of Meireles’ iconic, immersive installations.

Meireles has made some of the most philosophically brilliant, politically telling and aesthetically seductive works in recent art. Since the late 1960s he has created sculptures and installations, which involve an element of participation. His deep interest in the relationship between the sensorial and the cerebral, the body and the mind, is now seen as one of the defining characteristics of the post-war Brazilian avant-garde, out of which Meireles emerged with his early works at the end of the 1960s. He has remained loyal to these origins, and to a political and ethical viewpoint formed outside the so-called cultures of plenty.

Early work in the exhibition includes Meireles’ Arte física from 1969, reflections about distance and borders in relation to the vast land of Brazil. His Condensado series features small works that demonstrate that the potency of an artwork is not restricted to its size. The artist further explores space and scale in his drawing series, Espaços Virtuais: Cantos 1967-8. Meireles’ celebrated Insertions into Ideological Circuits 1970, by which he devised a method to disseminate messages of protest under the military dictatorship in Brazil, and his Zero Dollar/Zero Cruzeiro project 1978-84 and 1974-78, are also exhibited together with smaller-scale philosophical objects dealing with questions of perception such as Oscura luz 1982.

Among the highlights are several large-scale installations. These include Através 1983-9, a labyrinth of barriers that the viewer is invited to navigate, and at the heart of which shines a vast ball of crumpled cellophane. Another is Desvio para o Vermelho 1967-84, an all-red apartment filled entirely with red objects leading through a darkened corridor to a room with a pool of red liquid on the floor and a sink running with red water, loaned from Collection Inhotim Centro de Arte Contemporânea in Brazil. Babel 2001, a gigantic tower of more than 800 radios, all tuned at low volume, forms a startling yet complex contemporary take on the mythical tower of the world’s languages. The exhibition ends with Volatile 1980-94/2008, a multi-sensory environment through which visitors are invited to walk, playing with our response to danger, real or imagined.

The exhibition is curated by writer and curator, Guy Brett and Vicente Todolí, Director Tate Modern, with Amy Dickson, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern, and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

Throughout the duration, the MuAC will organize a series of parallel activities, ranging from a full program of lectures, to a film cycle devoted to the Brazilian avant-garde of the sixties and seventies.

Mira Schendel, Untitled- ‘Notebook’ series’, c. 1970
Letraset on paper, 22.5 x 22.5 x 7cm

June 2 – July 11, 2009

Stephen Friedman Gallery presents an exhibition of monotypes and other works from the Estate of the Brazilian artist Mira Schendel (b. 1919, Zurich d. 1988, São Paulo). This two-part exhibition encompasses an in-depth survey of the artist’s works and includes seminal drawings from the 1960s and paintings, objects and collages from the 1950s to the 1980s. This group of oil transfer drawings on thin Japanese paper, known collectively as ‘monotypes,’ have never been shown before.

This exhibition at Stephen Friedman Gallery coincides with a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (5 April – 15 July 2009), entitled ‘Tangled Alphabets,’ which focuses on the work of Mira Schendel and León Ferrari and cements their position as two of the leading exponents of Latin American Modernism.

Born in Europe in 1919, Mira Schendel is an artist whose life and art were shaped by the tumultuous events that broke apart communities on the Continent leading up to the War. Her Jewish parentage and Catholic education contributed to her profoundly spiritual and philosophical approach to her art making. Displaced by fascist persecution in Italy, Schendel eventually immigrated to Brazil leaving behind her family. Participating in the first São Paulo Biennial in 1951, Schendel soon found herself among the intellectual elite and began to show her work frequently. Her early paintings, in dense tones and textured surfaces, stood apart from the prevailing Concretist movement and suggested dissatisfaction with pictorial means. In life, Schendel was an avid reader and continued correspondence with poets, philosophers and theologians throughout Brazil and Europe. It was in the 1960s that her work began to incorporate language, albeit silently, and it eventually became a crucial part of her formal vocabulary.

The ‘monotypes,’ produced in 1960s and shown here, were extremely experimental at the time. They were made by applying talcum powder to one side of a piece of Japanese tissue paper and laying this paper onto a pre-oiled glass sheet. Schendel then ‘drew’ with various instruments including her fingers by applying pressure to the unoiled side. The process created an emotive line that almost felt like part of the paper and allowed Schendel to respond gesturally and calligraphically to the material. These graphic marks, letters and blotches resulted in extraordinarily beautiful and poetic two-sided drawings which Schendel insisted be shown suspended and encased between two sheets of glass.

Also included in this exhibition is a single rare example of the ‘Objetos Gráficos’ of the late 1960s. Similar in technique to the monotypes, though much larger in scale, this beautiful object is painted in deep red and is peppered with symbols and markings on top and inside the acrylic sheets. Installed in front of a window with natural daylight, the layering of texture and gesture within slowly unfolds. Critic Rodrigo Naves states: “superimposition, transparency, and space were all parts of these works, and the galaxies and constellations of their arrangements reinstated the tension… in a wider, perhaps even cosmic setting, transposing to a superhuman scale the interplay of chaos and meaning.”

Other important objects such as ‘notebooks’ and ‘discs’ from the 1960s and early 1970s are also shown here. In this period Schendel began to dispense with her own touch and turned to commercial materials, such as ‘Letraset’ and acrylic. Synthesising the formal experimentation with the ‘monotypes,’ this body of work continued to embrace spiritual ideas of ‘the other side’ of transparency, a place where other worlds and other forms of materiality existed. The notebooks consist of pages of different coloured sheets of paper, patterned with holes and Letraset printing and bound together at one corner so that the layers spin out and expand in one dimension. Similarly, the round ‘discs’ are also made from acrylic sheets sandwiched together. They encase flurries of Letraset letters and symbols, which are legible but untranslatable compositions. Here too, language is seen as a sort of cosmic dust, inchoate and infinite.

Representing Schendel’s late career is an important work from the ‘Sarrafos’ series. These paintings expressed the conclusion of her experiment in line and form. Unlike the exhaustive workings of the ‘monotypes,’ the ‘Sarrafos’ articulate a Zen-like distillation of her ideas and pursuit of the void. Here, the mute white monochromatic paintings with their protruding forms rupture the pictoral space and deny the plane and surface of the painting. Schendel’s experiment in language ultimately concludes in the impossibility of utterance but in the purity of gesture alone.

Work by Cildo Meireles

From The Art Newspaper, June 6, 2009:

Exhibitions axed as recession bites:
US worst hit as sponsorship withdrawn and endowment wealth shrinks
By Jason Edward Kaufman and Martin Bailey

“An Art News paper survey suggests that a growing number of exhibitions are being cancelled because of the recession. We have identified over 20 important shows that have been axed (or, in a few cases, postponed) later this year or in 2010.

Our list almost certainly represents the tip of the iceberg. Many venues have not yet published their 2010 programme, and some unannounced shows that had been provisionally scheduled are being quietly dropped. Decisions may have been influenced by a number of factors, but according to our research financial concerns were key.

The situation seems considerably worse in North America than in Europe. This is probably because North American museums are much more dependent on private sponsorship and endowments—particularly hit by the recession—while Euro pean institutions receive more government funding.

Among the worst-hit institutions is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma), with at least three major shows being lost. In August it was to have presented “Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video from Japan”, coming from New York’s International Center of Photography, where it was shown last year. This has now been cancelled.

In November, an exhibition on Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles was due to come to Lacma after first showing at Tate Modern in October 2008 and the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (where it closed in April). The entire North American tour has been cancelled, including presentations at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts (originally scheduled for June) and Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario (in March 2010).

Meanwhile, a retrospective on the Armenian-born Ameri can artist Arshile Gorky who died in 1948 had been scheduled for Lacma in June 2010, but has been dropped. Organ ised by the Philadelphia Museum of Art (opening October 2009), Tate Modern is now the only other venue for the exhibition (spring 2010).

In some cases, late moves have been made to rescue shows. Tate Britain had long planned a major exhibition on Zoffany for autumn 2010. Earlier this year it was dropped, partly because of its financial viability in the present economic circumstances.

The Royal Academy has now stepped in and has taken the show for spring 2012. It is notable that the Academy felt it could make the project viable, despite Tate’s concerns.
Tate Britain, therefore, has a gap in its programme, and plans are being considered to extend its yet-to-be-announced Henry Moore exhibition. This large show will look at the sculptor’s place in modern art, supported with loans from the Henry Moore Foundation.  The proposal is to extend it from a normal three-month run to six months.

Even if it is mainly American museums that are cancelling shows, this can directly impact on European institutions, in the case of touring exhibitions. Presenting an exhibition at several venues spreads costs or brings in a fee to the originating museum. The Victoria and Albert Museum is touring “Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design”, which was due to have been presented at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in February 2010. This has now been cancelled. V&A director Mark Jones told us that “we have seen some cancellations of our travelling exhibitions, and it would be foolish to pretend there are no problems”.

Another example is the French 19th-century artist Jean-Léon Gérôme, which opens at the Getty in late 2010 and will then be presented at the Musée d’Orsay in early 2011. The showing at Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum in spring 2010 has been cancelled. Walters’ director Gary Vikan said that the show would have resulted in a net loss of $300,000. “In normal times, we could have lived with that,” he said.

Shows cancelled or postponed
• Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, “Jean-Léon Gérôme”, February-May 2010, cancelled
• Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, “Subversion of the Images: Surrealism and Photography”, spring 2010, cancelled
• Chicago, Field Museum, “Lucy’s Legacy: the Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia”, planned for 2009-10, dropped
• Denver, Denver Art Museum, “Imperial Mughal Albums from the Chester Beatty Library”, July-September 2009, cancelled
• Honolulu, Contemporary Art Museum, “Japan Fantastic” (11 contemporary artists), December 2009-March 2010, cancelled
• Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, “Cildo Meireles”, June-September 2009, cancelled
• Kansas City, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, “Rafael Lozano-Hemmer”, February-May 2009, cancelled
• London, Tate Britain, “Johann Zoffany”, autumn 2010, cancelled and moved to Royal Academy
• Los Angeles, Getty Museum, “Franz Messerschmidt”, September 2009-January 2010, postponed
• Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video from Japan”, August-November 2009, cancelled
• Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “Cildo Meireles”, November 2009-February 2010, cancelled
• Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “Arshile Gorky: a Retrospective”, June-September 2010, cancelled
• Minneapolis, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, “Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design”, February-May 2010, cancelled
• New York, Brooklyn Museum of Art, “Donald Saff and the Art of Collaboration”, September 2009-January 2010, cancelled
• New York, Metropolitan Museum, “Duncan Phyfe: America’s Legendary Cabinetmaker”, January-April 2010, postponed
• Paris, Centre Pompidou, Indian contemporary art, 2010, postponed to 2011
• Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, “The Kingdom of Aragon” (15th-century Spanish painting), spring 2010, postponed to 2011
• Reykjavík, National Gallery of Iceland, “Off the Beaten Track: Violence, Women and Art”, September-December 2009, cancelled
• Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario, “Cildo Meireles”, March-June 2010, cancelled
• Vienna, Albertina, “Jörg Immendorff”, October 2009-January 2010, cancelled “

May 28 – June 27, 2009

May 13 – June 26, 2009

Participating Artists: Alberto Texeira, Alice Brill, Aloísio Magalhães, Anatol Wladislaw, Antonio Bandeira, Antonio Maluf, Arnaldo Ferrari, Décio Vieira, Fernando Lemos, Gisela Eichbaum, Hermelindo Fiaminghi, Ivan Serpa, João José Costa, Judith Lauand, Luiz Sacilotto, Maria Helena Motta Paes, Maurício Nogueira Lima, Milton Dacosta, Niobe Xandó, Rubem Ludolf, Rubem Valentim, Sanson Flexor, Thomaz Perina & Ubi Bava

Roberto Burle Marx’ sidewalks at Copacabana beach, Rio de Janeiro
Photo: Lalo de Almeida

“Rio de Janeiro — Brazil teems with jungles, forests and all sorts of exotic plants, flowers and trees. But until the Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx came along to tame and shape his country’s exuberant flora, his countrymen had mostly disdained the natural riches that, often literally, flourished in their own backyards.

“Burle Marx created tropical landscaping as we know it today, but in doing so he also did something even greater,” said Lauro Cavalcanti, the curator of an exhibition devoted to the work of Burle Marx that runs through March at the Paço Imperial museum here. “By organizing native plants in accordance with the aesthetic principles of the artistic vanguard, especially Cubism and abstractionism, he created a new and modern grammar for international landscape design…”

Installation view

September 5 — October 5, 2008

Eleven Rivington presents a group exhibition of Brazilian artists titled ACTIVE FORMS. Curated by Fernanda Arruda, it brings together abstract works on paper and sculpture by Edgard de Souza, Marcius Galan, Mira Schendel and Camila Sposati. The show expands on the rich and significant history of Latin American conceptual abstraction and provides a contemporary view as it is practiced by a current generation – and contextualized by a small selection of works by the late Mira Schendel (1919–1988), whose work will be part of a 2-person retrospective at MoMA in spring 2009. De Souza, Galan, and Sposati all currently live and work in São Paolo, Brazil.

September 25 — November 18, 2008

Hélio Oiticica, detail of Tropicália (1967)

Tropicália is an incredible exhibition — the first comprehensive survey of one of the most significant chapters in modern cultural history, a period beginning in the late 1960s when daring experiments in Brazilian art, music, film, architecture and theater converged. The exhibition features artists Lygia Clark, Antônio Dias, Nelson Leirner, Hélio Oiticica, and Lygia Pape, among many others.  Don’t miss it.