Galeria Millan holds, from 3/11 to 4/8, the group show Portraits, curated by art critic and researcher Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa. The exhibition gathers 30 works by Brazilian artists that, since the 60’s, explored the portrait’s genre as a field of aesthetic investigation.
“This genre allowed approaches to diverse cultural processes and realities, such as photography and painting, the universe of conceptual art and fashion,” says the curator. “There were many Brazilian artists who explored this field; The selection emphasizes the dialogue between the artists, from unpublished artworks by names represented by the Millan Gallery to items from private collections that are rarely exposed to the public.”
Integrate the show: Wesley Duke Lee, Tunga, Mario Cravo Neto, Waldemar Cordeiro, Geraldo de Barros, Carlos Fajardo, Claudio Tozzi, Regina Parra, Lenora de Barros, Maya Luxemburg, Vik Muniz, Sergio Romagnolo, Boi, Rodrigo Andrade, Ana Prata, Gilda Vogt, Otavio Schipper, Tatiana Blass, José Resende, Fernando Zarif, Bob Wolfenson and Janaina Tschäpe.
“Questions raised by Wesley Duke Lee since the 1960s - on the ritualization of the portrait process, commissioned art production and serial reproduction, among others - served as inspiration for this show, as well as conversations held with Tunga between 2014 and 2016”, explain Rafael Vogt. In one of these meetings, Tunga, instigated by the critic, established parallels between his work and that of Mario Cravo Neto, both gathered in this exhibition: “Mario Cravo was in a position to look and incorporate that archaic world that is present in Brazil, where everyone is animist, want it or not. This is latent in the construction of subjectivity that people experience culturally, not because they are Brazilian, but because they live in a still fresh contact with archaisms that are constitutive of that society.”
Celebrities and anonymous figures are represented on the show. The techniques and supports used are diverse, from the digital prints The Woman Who Is Not BB (1971), made by Waldemar Cordeiro, from the iconic image of the face of a Vietnamese girl, and Kate (2011) by Vik Muniz, based on a portrait of Kate Moss; To the transposition of a familiar memory into the space of contemporary art, contrasting public and private, in José Resende’s “Portrait of My Father” (1965) (photograph and acrylic box in metallic support) or the plastic sculpture “Girl with Towel in the head” (2000), by Sergio Romagnolo, which used as a model the artist’s daughter.
There is also a self-portrait (1983/87) by the painter José Carlos Cezar Ferreira (Boi), famous character of the Brazilian artistic scene in the 1980s, currently little known by the public. “The curatorship highlight the experiments carried out in Brazil exploring the portrait genre, opening the show for the experience of visitors, without imposing any type of chronology or interpretation. We celebrate in this exhibition the multiple expressions of contemporary Brazilian art, taking into account the formation of the public and the perception of the ‘primitive technic’ in our culture”, concludes Rafael Vogt.