Southern exposure

ArtForum, April, 1996 by Georgia Lobacheff

Such a program is not, however, without precedent. Luisa Strina, who established her blue-chip Sao Paulo gallery in 1974, also began looking beyond Brazil in 1990, by participating in art fairs from Cologne to Basel. And in Rio, the now more than decade-old Thomas Cohn gallery featured exhibits of works by Latin American artists such as the internationally prominent Argentinean Guillermo Kuitca, throughout the '80s. The Sao Paulo galleries Gabinete de Arte Raquel Arnaud (which continues to exhibit work in the Concrete tradition such as that of Sergio Camargo, whose traveling retrospective is now on view at the Oxford MOMA in the U.K.) and Galeria Milan (dedicated to launching a number of new artists each year) are also key players. Like Andre Milan, Ricardo Trevisan, head of Casa Triangulo, likes to take risks by mounting solo shows of emerging artists each season. Two more recent additions - Galeria Adriana Penteado, which specializes in drawings, and Valu Oria, which opened in November of last year - testify to the vitality of the burgeoning Sao Paulo art scene.

Just two years ago, Strina, in conjunction with art consultant Isabella Prata, initiated a multipart project "DasAmericas" (The Americas/Of the Americas) which attempts to address questions that inform contemporary visual production throughout America - North and South. Curated by Argentinean critic Carlos Basualdo, the exhibition was held in Strina's gallery and brought Roni Horn, Mike Kelley, and Meyer Vaisman to Sao Paulo for the first time. In the fall of '95, the second part of "DasAmericas," put together by Brazilian curator Ivo Mesquita, examined the representation of the body in works by Robert Gober, Gabriel Orozco, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Matthew Barney, and Edgard de Souza. Sao Paulo audiences were treated not only to a screening of Barney's Cremaster IV but to Barney himself, who came down for the opening.

This fall, Strina and Isabella Prata are planning to bring Nan Goldin's visions of New York's demimonde to Sao Paulo; Robert Mapplethorpe's classically composed, ever-controversial photographs as well as Jenny Holzer's more acidly political work will follow. In addition to these projects, Prata is now working on what may turn out to be one of the most innovative shows of this coming season: an exhibition put together by five young curators who were asked to investigate artistic production across the country - including those cities from the north and northeast of Brazil normally ignored in such surveys, Porto Alegre, Recife, Fortaleza, and Sao Luis - and to focus only on artists who have never shown in galleries.

In Rio, things have also been heating up on an institutional level. Recently, the Paco Imperial, whose activities had been severely curtailed for several years due to government cuts, regained its central position in the Rio art scene with a pro gram that aims to examine the relationship between contemporary work and the history of Brazilian art. In 1994, the Paco organized an important show, "Escultura Carioca" (Sculpture from Rio), featuring the sculptures and installations of a number of Rio's most interesting artists: Ernesto Neto, Jose Damasceno, Marcia Thompson, Mauricio Ruiz, and Carlos Bevilacqua. The Museum of Modern Art in Rio, a fundamental center for the dissemination of art in Brazil in the '60s whose exhibition halls, along with much of its collection, were destroyed by fire in 1978, has been fully refurbished and has reassumed its central role in the Rio art scene. Several other spaces on an institutional scale have also stepped up their efforts, such as the gallery of the Espaco Cultural Sergio Porto, which since opening its doors in 1980 with a show of Lygia Pape has become an almost obligatory exhibition site for emerging artists: most of the Brazilian artists successful both at home and abroad have exhibited here at one time or another. Take, for example, Valeska Scares and Fernanda Gomes, who both had pieces in the Sao Paulo Bienal in '94 and showed in New York in January of '95. Attempting to launch young artists while maintaining an exhibition program that presents significant contemporary works, the gallery of Sergio Porto exhibited videos on contemporary artists in conjunction with Arma Falica (Phallic weapon), a magazine version of a television soap opera that was realized by Antonio Manuel and Helio Oiticica in 1970; the 24 photos that comprised this project were exhibited here for the first time. Another institution essential to the Rio art scene is the School of Visual Arts at Parque Lage. The center of resistance to the military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985, it was the site of irreverent, antigovernment demonstrations that often took an abstract, conceptual form. It was here that the artists who came of age in the '80s - Beatriz Milhazes, Daniel Senise, and Rodrigo Andrade, to name a few - studied, and today many of those same artists have returned to teach the next generation.