Descripción de la Exposición
Museum of Contemporary Art of Paraná (MAC-PR), in Brazil, receives and presents the collective exposition Uncommon(s). This is an original exposition that gathers, in direct dialogue, artists from MAC’s collection side by side with five invited artists carefully selected by Pollyana Quintella. These artists’ works are open to plural interlocutions with the public, with MAC’s collection and resignify themselves in a broader context – inside a museum’s room. The exhibition is on view until July 31.
In addition to continuing with the project of remixing the works of MAC’s Paraná collection with invited artists, Uncommon(s) brings a powerful new asset: the invited artists in this exposition open the MAC’s Collector’s Club, which aims to encourage collectors of contemporary art and the fundraising for new acquisitions of works that will be incorporated to the institution’s collection in the future. This is the first activity of the Friends of the MAC Assotiation (AAMAC), a non-profit organization created exclusively to raise funds por the preservation the MAC’s Paraná collection.
Historically, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Paraná is a space for the funding and the preservation of art produced in Brazil since the 40’s. Thus the Collector’s Club reinforces still more profoundly this Museum’s vocation and strengthens the preservation of contemporary artistic memory which is here safeguarded.
UNCOMMON(S)
Opening the Museum of Contemporary Art of Paraná (MAC-PR) Collector’s Club “Uncommon(s)” presents to the public a series of multiple originals and revisited works by five invited artists, besides other works that contextualize their production. We’re led to follow different trajectories and repertoires that, together, revisit the way in which we understand our surroundings. Uncommon(s) is everything that is not customary. It’s everything that is out of the ordinary, abnormal, infrequent. Sometimes, to better visualize reality, it’s necessary to produce difference in it, a detour of pattern, some distance that makes us observe the situation by another point of view. Oriented by this perspective, the artists gathered here possess the fruitful ability to estrange things, take them out of their common usage and protocols, revisiting their meaning in the world.
Mano Penalva focuses on the materials and utensils present in popular markets, everyday tasks and everyday life. What the artist does is awaken that vocabulary in its common use by rearranging, accumulating, contrasting, shifting subtlety its meaning. Washington Silveira exhibits sculptures that are the product of an intimate connexion between an artisanal knowledge and surrealist-like procedures. Before them, we might think we’re in a dream. Daniel Acosta, by transiting between the lexicon of Architecture and Design, enlarges and decontextualizes migrated forms of historical referents, making us see them already separated from their original narratives. Tony Camargo explores the possibilities of painting in an expanded field. His FOTOPLANOPINTURAS are characterized by clean and dense surfaces, a large mastery of colors and signs that configure games of light and movement. The lesson here is that paintings are everywhere. Still on the pictoric field, Maya Weishof presents a multiplicity of unknown characters with deformed and unusual bodies that make us emerge in fragments of seduction and disgust.
Together with them, we chose to establish neighborly dialogues with important historical works of the 60’s and 70’s from the MAC-PR Archive. It is known that those years were witness to a radical experimentation in the artistic field, expanding concepts, categories and possibilities in art in relation to the public sphere and its sociopolitical context. In Brazil, they are two fundamental decades for the development of a cultural production that poses questions that are still relevant to contemporary art. António Manuel, Cybele Varela, Henrique Fuhro, Pietrina Checcacci, Vera Chaves Barcellos, Solange Escosteguy and UbiBava presents here a variety of preocupations that guided those years. There is in some of them the strong presence of the New Figuration in their assimilation of images and messages of mass communication and industry, the use of simplified techniques and pre-produced materials, the use of few saturated colors and the commitment with political events. In others, it’s possible to see the enlargement of the concrete perspective, already without dogmas and more dedicated to the explorations of the optic effects and kineticresources (UbiBava) or the expansion of supports (Solange Escotesguy).
Besides, it is not uncommon for the critical discourse about the present in Brazil to make constant references to the past, especially to those years, in the political and cultural plane. There is talk of historical similarities in search of the origin of non-elaborated traumas in events of yesteryear that now come back as the “return of the repressed”, according to a Freudian perspective. But then the image of Brazil as “the country of the future” was still believed, based on the idea of progress, today the optimism is at a low point, and we abdicate of the historical promise for a post-utopian promise. Apocalyptic narratives sound more familiar. The history really isn’t linear, after all. It seems necessary to dance with time in a spiral, and in between this delicate perspective, we search to confront historical and contemporary works; to approximate echoes of the past with whispers of the present with the understanding that to be contemporary does not mean to limit oneself to a presentism enclosed to the here and now as a starting point. Walter Benjamin teaches us that contemporaneityis a co-temporality, a correspondence between multiple times. Yesterday, after all, is always up to debate.
In conclusion, these are works that challenge conventional structures of enunciation and representation, aiming to expand our ways of writing the world and ourselves. If it’s not possible to exist outside of language, it’s by it that we sophisticate the imagination that allows us to organize reality, testing different ways of living and dreaming collectively, yesterday and today.
Exposición. 31 oct de 2024 - 09 feb de 2025 / Artium - Centro Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo / Vitoria-Gasteiz, Álava, España
Formación. 07 nov de 2024 - 28 nov de 2024 / Museo Nacional del Prado / Madrid, España
