NOTA: LAS FECHAS INDICADAS SON SÓLO ORIENTATIVAS.
"Ione Saldanha: Inventing the City" (working title) is the first solo show devoted to the artist in São Paulo in 36 years, and will be the largest and most comprehensive to date. Curated by Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director at MASP, the full scale retrospective exhibition will include approximately 200 works spanning more than five decades of the artist’s career.
Ione Saldanha (1919–2001) is a pioneering though overlooked figure in the history of 20th century Brazilian art. Although working in an intuitive manner, the development of Saldanha’s both rigorous and poetic oeuvre over the course of almost six decades is remarkably coherent. One series or group of works unfolds and progresses into the next one—from the early figurative paintings, to the abstract three-dimensional late works. One could think of painting in the expanded field as a leitmotif for Saldanha’s work: she painted on canvas, on paper,...on long strips of wood, on bamboos, on spools, and at last on stacked objects. Color and constructivism were also part of her idiom—on the one hand, her many different palettes over the years are as unique as they are striking; on the other hand, geometry and verticality were always underlying references in the construction of her works. At the core of Saldanha’s work was a concern with a certain representation of the city and architecture, real or imagined. Thus she turned from her early cityscapes to progressively abstracted architectural constructions represented in a fluid and organic manner, always carrying the imprint of the artist’s hand, made visible in the pictorial field.
Her most iconic, complex, layered and groundbreaking works, the Bambus [Bamboos], are upright painted sculptures that evoke Brazilian popular and vernacular culture and are at once anthropomorphic and referencing the city and the forest, particularly when installed in groups, creating an immersive quality. The title of this exhibition takes the cue from a 1962 solo show of the artist titled Cidade inventada [Invented City] at Galeria Relevo in Rio de Janeiro. Although one could identify a number of common concerns in her work and that of some of her most radical contemporaries (particularly Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape), Ione Saldanha never aligned or associated with any groups or movements, something rife in Brazilian mid-century art circles. Instead, she developed a rather quiet and detached trajectory that allowed her to focus on her extraordinary and prolific work, exploring the relations and crossovers between abstraction and figuration, geometry and landscape, hard edge and hand made, representation and presentation, painting and sculpture, art and life, all imbued with luscious, vibrant, delicate and multifarious color combinations.
The retrospective exhibition will be accompanied by a major publication edited with text by Adriano Pedrosa, and contributions by Frederico Morais, Laura Cosendey, Luisa Duarte, Luiza Interlenghi, Luiz Camilo Osorio, Marta Mestre, Pollyana Quintella, Vivian Ostrovsky, as well as historical interviews with the artist.
Entrada actualizada el el 20 jul de 2021
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