Nara Roesler

Nara Roesler New York is pleased to present Exploded View, André Griffo's first solo show in the United States. With a critical essay by Lúcia Stumpf, the show brings together around 12 works by the artist developed over the last year specifically the exhibition. With a background in Architecture, André Griffo considers the representation of elaborate architectural spaces to be an integral part of his poetics. “The main theme of my research is religion,” says the artist, who through his work seeks to reflect on how religion has been used as a tool for control and domination throughout history. Griffo uses religious architecture to examine the historical relationship between the presence and power of the church from Brazil’s colonial past to the present day, where neo-Pentecostal pastors use religion to influence politics, while simultaneously being linked to paramilitary groups. The exhibition title refers to the technical drawing of the same name, which consists of a diagram showing a relationship or sequence of assembly of various parts in a set. This concept is present in the exhibition through a sequence of five works created by the artist; Farm management instructions X, part of the eponymous series of paintings, represents the interior space of an old church, with an altar in the center, paintings on the ceiling, and a series of ornamental elements that emphasize the sacred figure located on the altar. In the artist's words: “the sacredness of this type of figure lies not only in itself, but in all the ornaments that highlight it. Their importance is so great that they often stand out more than the figure itself, and can even play their part”. The main painting, however, does not only feature sacred elements but is located within a larger space, possibly a large farm. There are no human representations on a scale proportional to the space, except for a portrait on the wall of a man, possibly the owner of the place. On the floor, however, miniature figures are scattered about, reminiscent of slaves working tirelessly. In addition to the play on scales between space and characters, the room is composed of several plants historically used by the enslaved people in religious rituals. These elements refer to the fact that having been enslaved, forcibly removed from their homeland, and cut off from their customs, they could not exercise their faith freely notably having objects and icons confiscated.As a result, slaves had to adapt aspects of their original beliefs to their reality in Brazil, and began to use local plants as proxies, using them as a means of representing their deities. From this large painting, Griffo produced a series of other related works, consisting of fragments of the original composition that the artist ended up highlighting and representing individually. While the original canvas depicts the entire architectural space, in the following works the artist focuses on the details of the original composition, such as the apse, the altar, and the image of the Saint himself. References to art history in a broader sense are present in other works in the show, such as The Sleep of Constantine and The Dream of Constantine. The titles refer to a 15th-century fresco by Piero della Francesca, in which the painter recounts the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine to Catholicism. This is said to have happened through a dream, in which the ruler saw a cross carried by an angel. Touched by the image, he went into a decisive battle carrying the object and, victorious, embracing the new faith once and for all. According to Griffo, however: “This version of Constantine's conversion was discarded in the Middle Ages. Possibly even Piero, when he painted it, no longer believed the story, which ended up becoming a legend. It turned out that this conversion occurred much more out of political expediency, which draws parallels with the present day, where many political leaders use fables and fantasies to justify mixing religion and politics to gain supporters.” While in The Sleep of Constantine André Griffo rereads the panel painted by the Renaissance master, in The Dream of Constantine the artist tries to imagine what the Roman Emperor would have dreamt of. Based on Piero's composition, Griffo created an abstract painting of enigmatic patches of color, the first abstract painting of his career. Although abstract, it is intensely related to the other canvas, since he used the same chromatic palette as the others and echoes its horizon line. The dialog between the two –and the three-dimensional also appears in the painting from the series The Miniature Salesman, which depicts the interior of a subway station, where a salesman presents a series of small miniature dolls laid out in front of him. These dolls consist of figures such as evangelical pastors, policemen, and militiamen executing innocent people, sacred images, and other societal players responsible for sparking and maintaining violence, notably in Rio de Janeiro. In Miniatures, the artist creates 80 plastic figurines that correspond to those represented in the painting. While some are hanging, others are arranged under a tarp, as if they were for sale. The show also features a rare personal, or biographical work. 80's, made during Griffo's residency at the Wassaic Project in New York, depicts the artist's brother inside the bathroom of the LGBT Center in New York –a space marked by a wall work by the artist Keith Haring made in 1989– which refers to the moment of deep anguish experienced by the LGBT community in the world, due to the AIDS epidemic, and consequently its stigmatization throughout the 1980s. Haring's painting coincides with when the artist's brother left his hometown of Barra Mansa and migrated to the United States to be able to live his sexuality freely. When he visited the place, Griffo immediately remembered his brother, who had directly experienced this moment and survived the repression of society and the condition of an immigrant. Conceiving architecture as an element conceived to shelter social relations, as well as painting as an illusionist tool, Griffo crosses these two medias not as a mere formal exercise, but as a way of tracing social structures and the problems arising from them, bringing in both historical elements and seemingly harmless everyday facts.

Nara Roesler New York is pleased to present Japan In/Out Brazil, a group exhibition that brings together the work of three artists from different generations who share Japanese origins and were born in, or have close ties to Brazil.

Nara Roesler New York is pleased to present Co(r)respondences: Constructive Affinities/Painting as Surface, the second edition of the Co(r)respondences project. Curated by Luis Pérez-Oramas, the curatorial initiative seeks to bring together groups of artists from different generations whose poetics establish dialogues with each other. This edition features thirteen artists, eight of whom are represented by Nara Roesler and the other international names invited. Although different from one another, the works dialogue with the curatorial axis of the exhibition, which consists of understanding painting as a special treatment of a surface and the types of constructivism that arise from this interpretation. In order to make the dialogues between the works visible, the exhibition will be divided into sections: Constructive Assembly and its relationship with Space—which includes works by Lydia Okumura, Bruno Munari, Elaine Reichek and Lucia Koch —, Serial Compositions of Elementary Forms—with Bruno Munari, Tomie Ohtake and Abraham Palatnik —, Mutable Surfaces as Agents of Temporal and Spatial Displacement — with works by Carlos Bunga and Eugenio Dittborn —, Repetition between Order and Chaos — with Antonio Dias, Chris Martin and Bruno Dunley — and Gestural Surfaces - with works by Karin Lambrecht, Mira Schendel and Cristina Canale. According to curator Luis Pérez-Oramas, the criterion for choosing these correspondences is not Art History, but rather Anthropology: “Only anthropology understands art as a politics of multiplicities, against the ghost of unification and synthesis, against a dominant element that subjugates everyone around it. Through a collision of contexts, anthropology suggests that art can only be universal on the condition that its universality consists in its incessant variation.”

Nara Roesler New York is pleased to present VOLUMENS, Rodolpho Parigi's first solo show in the US, which brings together around 35 new paintings made over the last two years. The exhibition title refers to a pictorial element widely used in Parigi's work throughout his career: elaborate volumes created in a two-dimensional medium, including paintings. This characteristic can be seen in the work of historical artists, who are considered references or inspiration for the artist, such as Pablo Picasso and Tarsila do Amaral. In VOLUMENS, his works of vivid colors,malleable, and ambiguous forms resemble body parts, organs, biomorphic forms, and sculptural abstractions. Over the last year, the artist conceived the works presented in the show through the connections they establish with each other. Although volumetry is widely used in the paintings, the shapes that compose the elements represented have a certain malleability, as if they were metamorphosing. Thus, the paintings share similarities, whether thematic or formal, which shown together, highlight the artist's poetic journey and the developments of his pictorial investigations. In Parigi's words: “I draw and paint figures aiming to transfigure bodies and pre-established ideas, confusion of genres and the exploration of boundaries between real or simulated images. Bodies are fused and remodeled to transform the canvas or paper surfaces, where containments and expansions are negotiated within the physical limits of the support.” The exhibition includes references to artists and movements in art history, especially Surrealism, which celebrates its centenary this year. The ambiguity of the forms and their exuberant coloring give the compositions a dreamlike and absurd aspect, which is close to the proposals of the artistic avant-garde. Parigi points out that the development of the works was a kind of dive into his own subconscious: "My work emerges from the conflict between reality and fiction. Through drawings, paintings, and performances I explore a universe of self-imagined fiction, inhabited by hybrid or androgynous figures of strange beauty, forms that inhabit the surface like living bodies that could even breathe or move."

Nara Roesler New York is pleased to present Angelo Venosa's first solo show in New York City, curated by Vik Muniz. The exhibition features around twenty works executed in the last years of his career, between 2015 and 2021, as well as pieces from the 1980s and 1990s and a set of studies and small-scale works produced by the artist using 3D printing technology. Although he began his artistic career amid the 80s Generation in Rio de Janeiro, Venosa dedicated himself to sculpture, differing from most of the artists of his generation, who were marked by their return to painting. His works in wood, wrapped in fabric, resin, and fiberglass, or composed of beeswax and teeth, evoke unusual volumes, housing an ambiguous temporality, emanating references to ancient eras.

Nara Roesler New York is pleased to present Why don't you know about Western remains?, Jaime Lauriano's first solo exhibition in the United States, curated by Igor Simões. The show brings together around ten works, including paintings, sculptures, and a video, which are recent developments in the artist's research and developed mainly over the last year. With its title taken from the first verse of the song For Lennon e McCartney by Milton Nascimento, the exhibition focuses on works that examine the formation of the imaginary of Brazilian society. From a decolonial perspective, Lauriano addresses current issues, always taking into account the past of Brazilian and Latin American societies, founded on colonial exploitation and slavery, exposing a deeply violent and unequal contemporary reality. In order to poetically understand this historical conjuncture, the artist revisits visual elements that have helped create this situation, ranging from great Brazilian art paintings to widely circulated everyday images, many of which are seemingly "harmless," like toys and stickers, but implicitly carry a huge burden of historical violence. In his pictorial works, the artist inserts various elements from popular visuality onto the canvas, ranging from colonial images to those associated with Afro-Brazilian religions. Through these works, Jaime Lauriano operates a kind of re-signification, with elements such as the word “Ax锹, or sacred figures like the Preto Velho², acting against colonial violence and bringing spiritual protection. Also featured are some recent works of a cartographic nature. Maps are a widely used element in the process of invading and scrutinizing subordinate territories. In these works, however, the artist makes these maps using pemba, a chalk used in Afro-Brazilian religious territories. He inserts territories and names associated with historical cartography into his maps, and at the same time, includes objects and visual signs associated with colonialism, racism, and contemporary violence. Pedro Álvares Cabral's Invasion of Porto Seguro in 1500 is also an offshoot of research that Jaime Lauriano has carried out since 2022. In this series, the artist reinterprets academic paintings produced between the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, which idealize facts from Brazilian history and place colonizers in heroic poses. The work in question is a painting by Oscar Pereira da Silva from 1900, which depicts the arrival of the first Portuguese settlers in what would become known as Brazilian territory today. Jaime empties the scene of people and characters, keeping only the scenery, and he inserts a profusion of stickers, which sometimes allude to colonial violence and sometimes to elements of resistance. Above, along the frame of the canvas, are miniatures of soldiers and popular figures linked to Afro-Brazilian religions, such as Zé Pilintra³, which are arranged in such a way as to simulate combat. Padrão dos Descobrimentos discusses Portuguese colonization more broadly, revisiting the monument of the same name, located in the city of Lisbon and designed in the 1940s to pay homage to those involved in Portuguese maritime expansion and the construction of the country's colonial empire. Here, however, the imposing landmark is reduced to a cast brass miniature, whose material was extracted from ammunition cartridges collected from conflict areas in Brazil. This military accomplishment, while celebrated in Portugal, was responsible for creating conflicts that still exist today. The exhibition also includes the artist's first work in cinematographic language, Cantando na Chuva (Singing in the Rain), from 2023. Made in partnership with the Legitimate Defense Collective, this film reinterprets the classic by the same name, starring Gene Kelly. As a starting point, the artist uses an episode of racial violence that took place in Rio de Janeiro in 2018, in which the police murder a black man after mistaking an umbrella he was carrying for a rifle. In the words of Igor Simões, the exhibition's curator: "This exhibition exists precisely because you don't want to know about the remains that is both the trace and the ballast of the experience of a continent founded on colonization."

Nara Roesler New York is pleased to present The Site of Images, a solo exhibition by Brazilian artist Daniel Senise curated by Luis Pérez-Oramas that brings together three different series of works produced by the artist between 2020 and 2023. Daniel Senise (b. 1955, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), a leading contemporary Brazilian painter and a significant member of Generation 80, has since produced a major body of work addressing painting beyond the traditional brush-stroke-over-canvas convention Since the end of the 1990s, Senise’s practice can be described as a ‘construction of images.’ His process begins with imprinting the textures of surfaces – such as wooden floors or concrete walls – from carefully chosen locations into textiles, using a technique similar to the monotype. This material becomes then the structural base of the work, either as a canvas to be worked on as a collage puzzle, including fragments added to printed photographs in order to create the final image. Frottage, imprinting, tracing, cutting and pasting, and residual texturing are part of the process from which brush and brush-stroke are willfully excluded. In that sense, Senise’s works conceptually mimic an ancient type of image known as acheiropoieta, meaning images produced without the painter’s hand. Senise's repertoire often relates to the memory of places and spaces. He therefore intertwines the representation of a site, with its debris, or in other words, its history –he juxtaposes time, memory, and the physical presence that stems from them. For the current selection of works that constitute The Site of Images–the latest developments from the series Museums and Galleries–it is the painter's studio, its concrete materiality as dust and debris which becomes the structural spine of images representing empty and monumental museum spaces. When the framed pictures that are usually shown in them are depicted in his paintings they happen to be erased. From the site of images, Senise's works only show the site itself, the haunting void of the museum or the poignant structure, almost funeral, of their architecture. It is telling that Daniel Senise has included, among the works depicting phantom images of museum's interiors, an example of his series devoted to the Vera Icona, the famous linen cloth where the face of Christ was miraculously imprinted. A sacred site of images for Christians, the Vera Icona is also a theoretical object enlightening the power, and the paradoxes, of images. Also, a picture made without human intervention–the very model of acheiropoieta–a prodigious image transfer, resonates with the large paintings carrying by their contact with walls and floors of the artist's studio the materiality, the fragment-relic of images. The object served as inspiration for several painters throughout the history of art. It is these representations, by artists such as El Greco and Zurbarán, that serve as the foundation for Senise take on it.. The artist adapts these original compositions, recreating them, but without including the face of Christ, so that the focus is on the brackets that support the image, its very material site. In the third group of works that are part of the exhibition, the artist highlights one of the fundamental techniques of his practice: the monotype of surfaces. Using a mixture of water and glue spread over the flooring of a determined space, the artist manages, with a cloth, to impress the markings to create surfaces stamped with the colors and signs of the place. Accidental images, their power of representation entirely lays on chance and subjective perception. These images, literal in their non-mimetic materiality, complement the ambitious body of abyssal images depicting museums: emptied abysses of images, the museums depicted by Senise are also images of images, images containing (erased) images, as the Vera-Icona itself: the endless site of images.

Nara Roesler New York is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of José Patrício in the United States. Bringing together approximately 15 works created by the artist from 2005 to 2023, the exhibition opens to the public on September 6, 2023.

Nara Roesler New York is pleased to present Co/respondences: Brazil and Abroad, a group show curated by Luis Pérez-Oramas where works by major Brazilian artists represented by Nara Roesler Gallery will be in dialogue vis-à-vis works by significant international artists not necessarily linked to Brazil, stressing their mutual resonance -either based on formal, structural, thematic, biographical or historical rationale. T

Nara Roesler New York is pleased to present the exhibition Parallel Inventions: Julio Le Parc & Heinz Mack, curated by Luis Pérez-Oramas, bringing together about 25 historic and recent works by both artists, central figures of Kinetic and Op Art , who have explored light and movement in their artistic practices. The exhibition, which opens to the public on May 9, includes iconic works from all the phases of their production, since 1955 to today. Albeit through different artistic approaches, Le Parc and Mack have developed throughout their careers a production centered on the search for light, color, and movement. Julio Le Parc (b.1928) and Heinz Mack (b.1931) have, produced abstract works that are similarly transformational of our understanding of the visual realm. Both of them were instrumental figures in the foundation and activity of two of the most influential and transformative avant-garde groups in mid-last Century in Europe: Mack was one of the founders (with Otto Piene and Gunther Uecker) of Grupo Zero in 1958 whereas Le Parc set, along with various contemporaries, the Groupe de recherche d’art visuel–GRAV in 1960. Their work has played a leading role in the landscape of Western optical abstraction. Parallel Inventions: Julio Le Parc & Heinz Mack takes ground on that fact, unfolding from connections and differences between their art throughout the last 60 years. However similar at some points in their successful and accomplished careers, the works of Heinz Mack and Julio Le Parc feature significant differences that contribute to define a signature character for each one: whereas both artists have never stopped delving into light, Le Parc has developed an entire repertoire based on anamorphic reflections, while Mack has stressed topological refraction. These two seminal figures of modern abstraction are very much active nowadays. Repetition and texture, veils and mirrors, movement and stasis, ground and void are elements that both artists continue to use in order to induce unlimited aesthetic effects. Their most recent production is a testament to the fact that the greatest artists achieve the peak of their art at their most venerable and experienced maturity. In the words of curator Luis Pérez-Oramas, "like old Titian, like old Picasso their current work has an effect of total restitution, as if the fruitfulness of age was the ceaseless infancy of genius."

Nara Roesler is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Brazilian artist Brígida Baltar in New York. Brígida Baltar (1959–2022): To Make the World a Shelter, curated by Luis Pérez-Oramas, showcases the artist’s poetic impulsion driving an oeuvre characterized by the articulation between fabulation and materiality. The exhibition proposes a selection of works that range from her early production in the 1990s, through her last works from 2022. Arguably one the finest Brazilian artists of her generation, Baltar kept herself devoted to an uncompromised poetics, embracing her life and body with her aesthetic ambition to grasp the world as an extension of her intimacy. Dealing with the notion of shelter, and the nostalgia of both home and origin, Baltar’s work was as eloquent as subtle, grounded in the idea of a ceaseless metamorphosis, and truthful to a sense of closenessas the artist stood out against the backdrop of a futile culture of hyper-exposure. Brigida Baltar initiated her career at the end of the 1980s and received national and international critical acclaim early on, earning a first invitation to participate in the 5th Bienal de Havana (Cuba) in 1994. She subsequently participated in numerous other biennials, such as the 25th Sao Paulo Biennal (Brazil) in 2002, the Bienal of the Americas in Denver (USA) in 2010, the 17th Biennial of Cerveira (Portugal) in 2013, as well as in four editions of the Mercosur Biennial in Porto Alegre (Brazil) in 2009, 2011, 2015 and 2020; amongst other solo and group exhibitions. Baltar centered her initial research on the experience, longing, and concept of home. While living in a house located in the Botafogo district in Rio de Janeiro, she accomplished her seminal works in the early 1990s through small performative interventions featuring her own body and home, which she photographed, and unfolded into a major anchoring repertoire of actions and objects, mostly based on the dust collected from the briquets of that home. With this material, Baltar produced countless drawings on paper, site-specific installations, and sculptures, which she continued to developed after moving from house to house, embracing a poetics that marked the trace of her former residence into the larger, outer world, as if by disseminating the material dust that constituted its solid presence the artist could signal the possibility of an expanded field for the notion of shelter. The exhibition includes a landmark work from this initial period titled Casa (1997) where the artist stored and categorized the brick dust from her home, placing it into 240 glass flasks according to color, as well as drawings representing natural elements, landscape and body parts using the brick dust itself as medium. The centrality of her body in her oeuvre translated into an encompassing, almost universal presence of femaleness. Brígida Baltar approached all media—video, installation, photograph, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, ready-made, textile—in order to experience the unlimited possibilities of associations and analogies, delving into a full repertoire of hybridity and collision of forms, notably in ceramics, weavings, drawings and sculptures, many of which are presented in the exhibition. Among them a core of porcelaine shell-like sculptures that interweave notions of shelter and body, exploring natural architectures and organic elements, such as Irmãs (2017), As lambidas do mar (2017), and A Carne do Mar I (2018), as well as weavings that depict hybrid organisms, such as A quimera das plantas [os cogumelos e a batata-doce] (2016), and later, map the surface of her stricken body in Os hematomas (2016). Brígida Baltar's untimely passing last year changed the impetus of this exhibition, transforming it into an elegiac celebration of her unique oeuvre. Ultimately, Brígida Baltar (1959–2022): To Make the World a Shelter, highlights the multi-faceted work of the artist, featuring her unique take on materiality and her ambitious, daring awareness of human bodily existence as inexhaustible source of both the impulsion and the exhaustion of life.

Nara Roesler New York is pleased to announce Clouds, a solo exhibition by Brazilian artist Bruno Dunley. A central protagonist of Brazil’s young generation of painters, the artist hereby presents his second solo show in the city, showcasing a body of paintings and works on paper developed over the last two years. Dunley’s current production continues to explore painting’s constitutive tensions, namely between image and structural thickness, matter and scheme, always determined by an emphatic use of color. Initiated during the pandemic, and thus produced in a more isolated environment, Clouds includes a series of paintings that appear to have internalized the artist’s surroundings at the time, suggesting bewildered and labyrinthine fields, and stressing an oneiric, subjective tone where color manifests in its excess, through undetermined spaces. Beginning in 2020, the artist has furthered his experimentation with color, notably fueled by his undertaking of the brand Joules & Joules, which he founded alongside artist Rafael Carneiro. With stalling imports, the now-growing business began during Covid-19 as a result of scarce prime oil paint and offers Brazil’s first high-quality and accessible national product to artists throughout the country. The endeavor launched the artist into a meticulous and highly experimental relationship with pigments, which is reflected in Dunley’s recent production. Motivated by a search for luminosity in the use of oil itself, he proceeds through layers of paint, left to cover or scraped, unfolding a material narrative for his paintings. Dunley’s works on paper are produced with chalk and charcoal, proposing a more succinct formal and chromatic repertoire. Many of the works on paper included in the exhibition engage with the idea of the cloud, with the artist repeatedly drawing its shape, not as a means of achieving compositional rigor but instead as a way of letting himself be guided by the investigative possibilities of draftmaking as a structural foundation for his paintings. In Cloud, the shape is explored as an abstract occurrence rather than a figure. Works such as Yellow Cloud, The cloud, and The city, capture its form on the brink of the formless, featuring a presence that seems to float within uncertainty. Clouds have always been limit-figures against the backdrop of geometry and perspective, fragments of reality that challenge measurement and graphic control, and, as in Dunley’s recent work, potentially, symbolic forms for abstraction, conveying lightness and ludic oneirism.

Nara Roesler New York is delighted to announce Orbital Tango, a solo exhibition by Artur Lescher (b. São Paulo, Brazil, 1962) curated by Luis Pérez-Oramas, presenting an important part of the artist's recent production. One of the most prominent artists in the contemporary Brazilian art scene, Artur Lescher's pieces transcend their sculptural character, crossing the boundaries between installations and objects to modify the understanding of these categories and the space in which they insert themselves. With an uninterrupted and precise dialogue with both architecture and design, Lescher has produced since the late 1980s, a core of three-dimensional work that stands out as a significant contribution to the legacy of abstraction in the Americas. Known for his impeccable pendular sculptures, his oeuvre also addresses metaphors of labor through useless machines, it challenges physical laws through radical solutions of balance and equilibrium and evokes images of conceptual landscape through his sculptures made with straps of felt or steel, titled Rivers. His production can be labeled as constructive, and is linked to precedents in High Modernism such as Constructivism and Suprematism that Lescher transforms through his impeccable poetics of space. Strongly linked to industrial processes, achieving extreme refinement and rigor in the mechanics of forms, Lescher’s production goes beyond a purely formal investigation. His work emphasizes imponderability, stressing the durational and accidental dimension of his works, to the extent of juxtaposing solid geometrical structures with materials characterized by impermanence or changeability, such as water, olive oil, and salt. In the words of Luis Pérez-Oramas, "Lescher's art implies, always, the practice of place as a field of movement and balance, tension and equilibrium: an Orbital Tango."

Nara Roesler New York is pleased to present Maria Klabin: Liquid Air, the first solo show by Brazilian artist Maria Klabin to be held in the United States. Curated by Luis Pérez-Oramas, the show introduces the North American public to Klabin’s work, an artist who has found in painting, a language for the constitution of images that can be apprehended both as imaginative, dreamlike and unusual, as well as realistic and quotidian. The exhibition is open to the public between September 7 and October 15, 2022. The holding of Maria Klabin's first international solo show in New York is a celebration of her own trajectory. In the late 1990s, the artist moved to the city to further her studies in photography. Soon after, she joined the Art Students League of New York and followed her long term interest in painting by delving into the study of pictorial language. In 2002, Klabin completed her studies and received her master's degree from Central Saint Martins, in London, UK. The works exhibited in Liquid Air reveal painting as an unfolding of the artist's practice in other fields, such as dance, which she has practiced since childhood, sculpture, developed in her youth, and photography. Exemplary, in this sense, are the large-scale landscape paintings that make up the show. Often, the artist uses an image photographed by herself as the starting point from which to develop her work on the canvas. Klabin finds in the photos visual pretexts that lead her to creating her own image. She begins with the movements of her body, drawing, with the brush, a choreography over the surface of the canvas. The physical attraction to the material is a manifest presence in Klabin's work, modeling the paint on the canvas to create figurations through the encounter between two bodies, hers and the painting's. Curator Luis Pérez-Oramas sees the origin of the artist's work in the body, noting that “Maria Klabin relates her decision to become a painter to her experience as a dancer. Dance – the body in movement, the body in space – is, therefore, involved in her practice, which, paradoxically, began in three-dimensional modeling.” For the artist, painting is an answer to a question that she does not yet know how to formulate. “I have the feeling that painting knows more about me than I do about it”, says Maria Klabin about her creative process. It all starts with a gesture, a mark that she makes on the canvas with her brush, a call and response, as each mark proposes a challenge, a question which needs an answer, through another brushstroke and another gesture, ultimately leading to a resolution and the creation of the final, dreamlike image. Another group of works presented in Liquid Air comes from research focused on observation, where the artist portrays everyday scenes on smaller canvases. During the pandemic, this production peaked as Klabin took isolation times as an opportunity to return to one of the key themes in her repertoire: portraiture. In 2017, the artist had already returned to the practice, painting people she was close to. One day, the model fell asleep during a session, which opened the way for Klabin to focus not only on the individuality of the subject, but on the relationships between them and the space, transforming the scene into a kind of domestic landscape. In Liquid Air, Klabin presents a series of paintings in which she has developed these portraits of sleeping individuals in greater depth, presenting them alongside paintings of still lifes, scenes of silence, as well as those of drowsiness, in which the painting – although remaining objective – finds a sense of freedom. In particular, it stands out how the two most usual scales, the intimate and the monumental, make it possible to establish different relationships between matter and representation, both in their making and in their fruition. According to Oramas, “her impressive paintings are true repositories of the trace of the gesture, of the density of the oil paint, of her broad, ambitious, fluid and liquid brushstrokes, behaving as the architectural structuring of her compositions.” Most often chosing intimate and monumental scales for her paintings, the artist establishes different relationships between matter and representation, both in their making and in their fruition. According to Oramas, “her impressive paintings are true repositories of the trace of the gesture, of the density of the oil paint, of her broad, ambitious, fluid and liquid brushstrokes, behaving as the architectural structuring of her compositions.”

Nara Roesler New York is pleased to present The fold in the horizon, a group exhibition curated by artist Marcos Chaves. The show brings together works by artists who began their practices at the end of the 1980s, and the beginning of the 1990s in Rio de Janeiro, and who have played a fundamental role in Brazilian contemporary art. The presentation highlights how this generation’s interests converged, sharing the same aspirations and concerns, and thus creating a space for intellectual and affective exchanges that, despite not resulting in a movement or group, helped consolidate practices that later became representative of Brazilian art of the time. The fold in the horizon opens to the public on June 24, remaining on view through 13 August, 2022. According to artist and curator of the exhibition, Marcos Chaves, the works are woven together through their relationship to the horizon, a constant element of the landscape of Rio de Janeiro. Rather than a component of the environment, the horizon serves as a metaphor in the exhibition. In Brazil, the 1980s became known for a return to painting under the influence of German neoexpressionism that emerged at the end of the 1970s. However, the artists in this show did not follow the gestural painting trend, instead taking their investigations towards ideas related to materiality, through works that intertwined sculpture, painting, drawing, installation, photography and video, also questioning the lines separating these mediums. In this sense, the artists shared the same aesthetic horizon with similar creative concerns, which developed over time into their respective forms of expression. Chaves, whose work was notably presented in a retropesctive solo exhibition at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro last year, hereby presents a selection of lesser known works by established artists, together with other fundamental figures of the time, highlighting the similarities and differences between their practices. The exhibition includes artists represented by the gallery such as Brígida Baltar, who has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art (2002), in Cleveland, OH, USA, and at Firstsite (2006), in Colchester, UK, as well as Raul Mourão who had a solo exhibition at Bronx Museum (2015) and at Nara Roesler (2021), both in NY, USA; alongside Marcos Chaves himself, Ernesto Neto, a leading figure in the fields of sculptural and installation work in Brazil, who has been presented at three editions of the Biennale de Venezia (2017, 2003 and 2001), and Fernanda Gomes, whose works are part of the permanent collections of Tate Modern, in London, UK, and of the Art Institute, in Chicago, IL, USA. The show also includes artists Ricardo Basbaum, Ricardo Becker, Enrica Bernardelli, Carlos Bevilacqua, Roberto Cabot, Rodrigo Cardoso, André Costa, José Damasceno, Fernanda Gomes,Tatiana Grinberg, Carla Guagliardi, João Modé, and Marcia Thompson. In Chaves’ words, the curatorial exercise brings together “artists that shared ideas, affections, and the same beach. As such, I have chosen these works through my affective memory.” Affection thus serves as yet another layer helping explain the cohesion between these different practices: not only are they formal investigations guided by the same principles, but also the result of exhanged ideas, and shared experiences that fomented artistic productions. The exhibition is part of the Roesler Curatorial Project, an initiative lead by Luis Pérez-Oramas that asserts the gallery’s ongoing commitment to innovative and experimental projects.

Nara Roesler New York is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of Brazilian artist Marcelo Silveira (1962), in the United States. The show is curated by Moacir dos Anjos, who notably curated the 29th Bienal of São Paulo and the 30th Panorama of Brazilian Art, the two most significant shows of contemporary art in Brazil. The presentation brings together works from different periods within the artist’s oeuvre, (ranging from 2005 to 2021), with a particular focus on his practice with Cajacatinga, a native wood from the Brazilian Atlantic forest. In Pernambuco, where the artist lives and works, this wood has been extensively logged to open land for the cultivation of sugarcane, and is now almost extinct, with mostly only roots remaining, themselves burnt successively during seasonal fires. Silveira collects such fragments, creating works that give the remnants new forms and purposes. The show also presents recent collages from the series Hotel Solidão, created with the use of images extracted from old magazines from the 1950s.

Nara Roesler is pleased to inaugurate its 2022 exhibition calendar with the first retrospective of Brazilian artist Abraham Palatnik (1928-2020) in New York. Curated by Luis Pérez-Oramas, Abraham Palatnik: Seismograph of Color presents a selection of works that reveal Palatnik’s fundamental role in Brazilian art in the second half of the twentieth century. It also highlights the relevance and pioneer character of his production in conceptualizing works of visual art as force fields, mediums of energy, and vectors of chromatic dynamism. The show is on view from January 13 to February 19, 2022. Abraham Palatnik is a monumental figure in Latin American art. Author of the earliest mechanical experiments with movement and color, the artist was a pioneer among practitioners of Op Art in the Americas. Over the course of seventy years of production, he established himself as a complex creator who expanded the possibilities of visual art by bridging, within his work, technology and art, energy and color, function and ornament, and nature and movement. His work can be found in several collections around the world including The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; the Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH); the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels; and Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM Rio), among others. Born in 1938 in the Brazilian city of Natal, in his early childhood Palatnik moved with his family to Tel-Aviv, where he remained until 1948. Trained as an artist and engineer there, he began to work influenced by both the School of Paris and Modern Bauhaus-like ideas. Upon returning to Brazil at age 19, Palatnik lived in Rio de Janeiro and joined the artistic and intellectual circle established around critic Mário Pedrosa, a key figure in Brazilian art in the twentieth century. In this context, he became friends with artists of his generation, exhibiting with Grupo Frente (Frente Group), which brought together figures such as Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, and Aluísio Carvão. One determining factor in his artistic development was his involvement with the National Center of Psychiatry in Rio de Janeiro, directed by the psychiatrist Nise da Silveira who, influenced by the ideas of Carl Jung, was an early advocate and fierce defender of art’s potential in the treatment of psychiatric patients. Palatnik coordinated painting and arts workshops alongside artists Ivan Serpa and Almir Mavignier. The impact of this experience with the psychiatric patients and the images they produced was so intense that it led Palatnik to abandon painting altogether. It was during the first São Paulo Biennial, in 1951, that Palatnik emerged on the art scene in a decisive way. This year his first Kinechromatic Device (1949) was rejected for not fitting into the existing categories. The piece would subsequently be accepted and awarded a special mention from the international jury. The work is pioneer in its use of artificial light sources, and over seven editions of the Biennial, between 1951 and 1963, several other Kinechromatic Devices were exhibited. In 1964, the artist gained international renown when these works were also exhibited at the Venice Biennale. Palatnik continued to investigate and innovate in the artistic field until the end of his life, creating works capable of fascinating viewers due to the elegance of their composition—whether by using mechanisms that choreograph a dance of colors and forms or by painting and molding materials such as wood, metal, plaster, and cardboard to create abstract images full of rhythm and movement. Although generally associated with kinetic art movements, Palatnik’s work seems to transcend categories. For curator Luis Pérez-Oramas, this “perhaps means that the central question of his work is not movement directly, and consequently his production transcends the trivial categories art history and criticism attribute to Op Art and even to Concrete Art...It is not, of course, about representing something in Palatnik’s work; on the contrary, it is precisely about presenting, for example, the clues, marks, and traces of movement and therefore what the work makes visible.” The essence of the artist’s work is movement and its vertigo, the transforming force that has one of its most powerful metaphors in nature. We see in his work a harmonic combination of these two universes: that of mechanical regularity, linked to human rationality and the desire to build things, and that of the organic character of the natural world, evoking the universe of sensations renewed by the constant transformation of the landscape. In addition to pieces from emblematic series, such as Kinechromatic Devices and Kinetic Objects, Abraham Palatnik: Seismograph of Color presents figurative paintings from the beginning of the artist’s career, including a self-portrait, sketches, drawings, and projects that allow us to enter into his creative process. On the occasion of the exhibition, Nara Roesler Books, the gallery’s editorial branch, will launch Abraham Palatnik: Encantamento/Experimentação, the most extensive monograph ever published on the artist. Organized by Luiz Camillo Osorio, it will be available in two editions: English and Portuguese. In addition to a prolific notebook with archival images and works by the artist, the book features historical and unpublished texts by renowned art writers such as Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Mário Pedrosa, Luis Pérez-Oramas, Abigail Winograd, Kayra Cabanas, and Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro.

Nara Roesler New York is proud to announce Tomie Ohtake: Visible Persistence a solo exhibition by artist Tomie Ohtake (b. 1913, in Kyoto, Japan-d. 2015, in São Paulo, Brazil), curated by Luis Pérez-Oramas. The show proposes a selection of key works, embracing over 50 years of production, which together punctuate the defining phases in the artist’s career, offering a succinct retrospective of her oeuvre. The exhibition inaugurates on November 4th, remaining on view through December 23rd, 2021. A paramount figure in Brazilian art during the second half of the 20th and the first decades of the 21st centuries, Tomie Ohtake is known for having produced one the most compelling body of works in late modern art in the Americas, embracing painting, sculpture, print-making, drawing, collage, theater staging, and monumental civic-scaled works. After a seminal period under the influence of lyrical abstraction, her work developed into a daring investigation on the density of painting that contrasted vis-à-vis the constructive-geometric and rational concrete art trending in Brazil during the 1950s and 1960s. Ohtake produced paintings featuring rich textural surfaces, notably made while blinding her eyes. These striking ‘blind paintings’ are of monumental historical significance in the Americas as they emphasize a corporeal density, contrasting against the backdrop of schematic concrete art, and proposing a bold phenomenological standpoint that stresses the whole human body—and not only its eyes—at the root of visual art. During the 1970s and 1980s, Ohtake produced an extraordinary series of paintings featuring a color-field, organic-driven figural version of abstraction. These works, exceptional for their beauty and masterful execution, and a peak within that period, can be linked to the whole tradition of vernacular modernism that took place in Brazil starting in the 1920s with the work of artists such as Tarsila do Amaral and Emiliano di Cavalcanti. Drawing from her Japanese upbringing and her understanding of visual art as a topological experience, she later pursued her work as a painter, theater-stage designer, and sculptor, which beautifully manifested in her late tubular structures and paintings of impeccable textural whiteness, created as she was approaching 102 years old. With works pertaining to each of these fundamental periods, Tomie Ohtake: Visible Persistence foregrounds the marked phases of the artist’s career, celebrating every stage in its distinction, but also stressing Ohtake’s drive to capture the density of space, color as a generative field, and the corporal experience of form. As one of Brazil’s most significant artists of her time, Ohtake attained outstanding institutional acclaim in the country, and more recently has received significant recognition worldwide, notably joining the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, in Dallas/TX (2019), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York/NY (2017), the M+ Collection, in Hong Kong (2017), and the Tate, in London (2016). Furthering the gallery’s continuous effort to expand the artist’s international presence, Nara Roesler presents Tomie Ohtake: Visible Persistence as an opportunity to consolidate the US public’s awareness of this artist’s truly unique legacy.

Nara Roesler New York is proud to announce a solo exhibition by Brazilian artist Cristina Canale (b. 1961, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), curated by Luis Pérez-Oramas. The exhibition opens on September 8, 2021, marking the artist's first solo presentation in the US, and will showcase a selection of Canale's most recent production.

Nara Roesler New York is proud to announce On the shoulders of giants, a group exhibition curated by Raphael Fonseca, one of Brazil’s most acclaimed emerging contemporary art curators, opening on June 24 2021. On the shoulders of giants will showcase Brazilian artists from different generations, whose practices investigate the relations and tensions between ideas of time and memory. The plurality of the works presented will offer an opportunity to delve into an ample array of propositions on these themes, presenting different aesthetic and conceptual interpretations. The exhibition foregrounds contemporary engagements with popular and ancestral narratives, exploring how they coexist and intertwine with modern day contexts, in order to develop collective memory. Image caption: On the shoulders of giants, exhibition view, Nara Roesler New York, 2021. Photo: Charles Roussel.

Nara Roesler is pleased to announce Empty Head, Raul Mourão’s first solo exhibition in its New York gallery, from April 27 until June 19, 2021. The presentation includes recent works that synthesize and connect Mourão's formal investigations to a political critique of contemporary issues.