11.25.2016 — 02.26.2017
Curadora: Victoria Giraudo
Gallery 5. Level 2
Opening: Thursday, November 24, 7:00 p.m.
Anthropophagy and Modernity: Brazilian Art in the Fadel Collection, a broad survey of Brazilian art through a selection from the more than 150 works in the Fadel Collection, one of the most important and most complete collections of Brazilian art. The exhibition offers a panorama of the various modern movements linked to the cultural construction of Brazil and continuing up to the beginnings of contemporary art.
It includes paintings, drawings, sculptures and objects by such central artists as Anita Malfatti, Tarsila do Amaral, Candido Portinari, Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, Víctor Brecheret, Maria Martins, Lygia Clark, Geraldo de Barros, Waldemar Cordeiro, Iván Serpa, Willys de Castro, Antonio Días, Rubens Gerchman, Hélio Oiticica and Anna Maria Maiolino, among many others.
Curated by Victoria Giraudo, the exhibition sets out to show the way in which Brazilian artists created an identity of their own and a cultural autonomy, both in dialogue with the projects of the international avant-garde and taking stock of their own autochthonous roots, and the varied cultural inheritances and racial mixtures inherent to Brazilian culture.
“The view of this curatorial version rests fundamentally on the concept of 'Modernity,' related to the great metropolises with strong international relations, and on the concept of 'Anthropophagy' understood as a model of appropriation and cannibalistic swallowing of what comes from outside Brazil. It is one possible narrative about how much of Brazilian art moved between the organic aspect of its landscape (the topographic curve of the Bay of Guanabara, of the Amazon River or the glades) and the straight, cold, anonymous line that symbolizes international modernity and rational progress," explains the curator.
We find here an international vision, from a neighboring country which shares with Brazil cultural heritages, sociological, political and commercial singularities, yet which at the same time is totally different in its geography, its history, its peoples and its languages.
The exhibition was produced and organized by MALBA and was presented earlier at the Museo Nacional de Arte de México (MUNAL) from June 16 to August 28, 2016.
Catalogue
On the occasion of this exhibition, MALBA has specially published a bilingual (Spanish and English) catalogue of 165 pages, reproducing a selection of the most important works presented in the show and including texts by the curator Victoria Giraudo and by Paulo Herkenhoff, until this year director of the Museo de Arte de Rio de Janeiro.
The Fadel Collection
With over 3,000 pieces, the Fadel Collection is one of the world's most complete collections of Brazilian art. It is a private collection started by Sérgio and Hecilda Fadel at the end of the 1960s, and it includes works from the colonial baroque to the present day. Since 2012, they maintain a strict link with the Río Art Museum (MAR) through Paulo Herkenhoff, its founding director, who, for over a decade, was the curator of the Fadel Collection and who inaugurated the museum with the exhibition Voluntad constructiva [The Constructive Will].
Video
In the Press
El arte brasileño llegó a Buenos Aires
La Nación, 01.12.2016
Sobre una modernidad tropical
Página 12, 27.12.2016
Un panorama artístico de los diferentes movimientos modernos ligados a la construcción cultural del Brasil
Télam, 23.11.2016
