Travesía Cuatro is pleased to announce the opening of Ana Prata's solo exhibition A vida das coisas at SESC Pompeia's Galpão das Oficinas de Criatividade in São Paulo, between April 30th and July 31st, 2022.
The artist is the first guest of the project Oficio: Mancha, after a period dedicated to actions in digital format. In this new edition, the show presents the use of the properties and powers of pigment in its multiple shades, in the possibility of clashing with the pictorial tradition and as an inspiring proponent for contemporary artists.
Beyond its creative purpose, the craft of art is also process, toil, and development. It comprises dedication to craftsmanship and potential construction of knowledge, with experimentation as a primordial element. Such vocations are part of the material and conceptual space of the Creativity Workshops at Sesc Pompeia, whose hangar corresponds to an effervescent meeting place, where masters and...students mix and forge unique trajectories. After a year dedicated to actions in digital format, the Ofício: project returns with the occupation called Mancha, with painting as the chosen technique and Ana Prata as guest, with the exhibition A vida das coisas. This new edition presents the use of the properties and powers of pigment in its multiple shades, in the possibility of clashing with the pictorial tradition and as an inspiring proponent for contemporary artists.
Ana Prata understands the challenge of exhibiting in a place of constant transit in the same way she faces the transience of her painting, moved by the spontaneity of the set path. Even if she escapes from the formal narrative structure, the artist responds to life through the image, snaking relationships that are established by the dialog that her works make possible.
By providing sensitive interlacements that may stimulate forms of artistic appreciation and develop profuse educational processes, Sesc fulfills its role, favoring the expansion of knowledge through cultural access. May the enchantment drawn by the plurality of human expressions nurture the developments that art can evoke.
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"The space of the Sesc Workshops presents, without a doubt, a challenge for visual artists used to showing their work in museums and galleries. In the case of Ana Prata, an artist who works exclusively with painting, the task of occupying the workshop shed made her consider not only the functions and uses of this space, but also its audience, consisting largely of those who frequent the institution and are also "amateur" artists, or even "lovers of visual and applied arts", in a variation of the etymological origin of the word. Moreover, there is a certain affinity between the approaches of Lina Bo Bardi - the architect who designed Sesc Pompeia - and Ana Prata: the appreciation for playfulness, visible in architectural details such as the windows in the shape of a cave in the sports center, in the "São Francisco River" that crosses the living space and in the pebbles embedded in the sidewalks around the building and that find correspondences in Ana Prata's paintings.
Both in what concerns the way of painting, the color palette and the pictorial elements that sometimes appear as quotations from erudite art sometimes refer to a mundane, or even childish, visuality. A vida das coisas brings together a set of paintings in different scales, from the monumental translucent "curtains" installed in some of the windows of the Galpão to works in small format presented on the walls of an environment of domestic proportions specifically built for this purpose (the "little house"). Most of them are works in which the artist explores the traditional genre of still life; but, paradoxically, Ana Prata's paintings have nothing of death or paralysis. On the contrary, they are full of life pulse; in them inanimate objects become forms full of vibration and movement, in compositions that overwhelm us with their explosion of desire and - why not? - joy. Just as Lina Bo Bardi readapted the old industrial complex at Sesc Pompeia, transforming the work space into a space for the celebration of leisure, Ana Prata transforms the genre of still life into a celebration of the life of things."
- Excerpt from Kiki Mazzucchelli's interview to Ana Prata, published in the exhibition's catalogue.
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Ana Prata (1980, Sete Lagoas, Minas Gerais, Brazil) There is a latent ambiguity in Ana Prata’s work that can walk between humor, interiority and critical spirit. Her colorist figurative paintings lately depict still lives of fruits and objects that appear cut from the landscape. An interior landscape that is hardly insinuated since it is not used as a resource of reality or context, on the contrary, it confronts us with a lyrical and symbolic dialogue with the domestic.
The artist relates to the modernist repertoire in a way that is neither reverential nor nostalgic, rather she seems to probe it as if she were an archaeologist, borrowing and distorting hieroglyphs to assimilate them into the conversation on contem- porary painting. The result is a body work that flirts with the decorative arts and graphism. Her lush stroke is at the same time combined with transparencies that give an atmospheric, solar and light effect to her optically dynamic images.
Ana Prata (b. 1980, Sete Lagoas, Minas Gerais, Brazil) graduated in Visual Arts from the University of São Paulo (USP).
She was part in the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo – Affective Affinities, which took place at the Bienal Pavilion in São Paulo (2018); she has also presented solo exhibitions at Galeria Millan (São Paulo, 2021, 2017, 2014); Travesía Cuatro Madrid (2020) and Guadalajara (2020); Auroras (São Paulo, 2019), Isla Flotante Gallery (Buenos Aires, 2019); Mário de Andrade Municipal Library (São Paulo, 2018); Pippy Houldsworth Gallery (London, 2016); Instituto Tomie Ohtake (São Paulo, 2012); Centro Cultural São Paulo (2009), among others.
She has taken part in group exhibitions at institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo; Caixa Cultural (Rio de Janeiro, 2017); Instituto Figueiredo Ferraz (Ribeirão Preto, 2015); SESC_Videobrasil (São Paulo, 2011 and 2013); Instituto Tomie Ohtake (São Paulo, 2011); Instituto Moreira Salles (Rio de Janeiro, 2013).
She was one of the nominees for the PIPA Award in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020. In 2011, she was a resident artist at the Red Bull Art House in São Paulo and at Unlimited residence, New York in 2016.
Her work is part of international collections including Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil; Pinault Collection, France; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, US; MAC, São Paulo, Brazil and Instituto Figueiredo Ferraz, Ribeirão Preto, Brazil.
The artist lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil.
Entrada actualizada el el 29 abr de 2022
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