The Turchin Center has a long-standing commitment to showcasing international artists. Past exhibitions have included artwork from South Africa (2014), Poland (2012), Mexico (2010) and China (2008). Now in its fifth international series, the Turchin Center highlights contemporary Brazilian artwork. Galeria Nara Roesler is one of the premier contemporary art spaces in Brazil, with locations in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and a new satellite showroom in New York City. The Turchin Center is honored to work with Alexandra Garcia Waldmen, Galeria Nara Roesler’s international artistic director, to bring the artwork of four important contemporary Brazilian artists to Appalachian State University. Each of these artists make work that is autobiographical, finding unexpected beauty in reshaping their environments with found objects.
International Series: Contemporary Artists from Brazil in the Main Gallery.
Raul Mourão; me + you + one; 2015. Photos courtesy of the artist and Galeria Nara Roesler.
Raul Mourão; me + you + one; 2015. Photos courtesy of the artist and Galeria Nara Roesler.
Brigida Baltar; Untitled; Watercolor on paper; 29.5 x 21 cm; 2011
Sergio Sister; Box # 275 (july); Oil on wood; 37.5 x 25.5 x 7.5 cm; 2015.
About the artists
Brígida Baltar lives in Botafogo, Rio de Janeiro. She is interested in creating quiet poetic gestures using material gathered from her home and studio. Her sense of home is both deeply personal and acutely physical: brick dust scraped from the walls of her family home before she moved out has become her signature material in both installations and drawings.
Raul Mourão lives and works in both Rio de Janeiro and New York City and is deeply influenced by the cacophony and frenzy of these big-shouldered cities. Since 2010, he has worked on kinetic sculpture that reflects the tenuous balance between the chaos and the structure imposed by corrupt politics and unstable economies – the urban geometry of social order. The steel bars represent ubiquitous material in urban landscapes—often used to fence people out, or in.
Vik Muniz was born in São Paulo and is undoubtedly one of Brazil’s most well known artists on the international art scene, maintaining high-profile studios in both Rio de Janeiro and New York. Muniz repurposes everyday materials in various playful and witty series that also offer a searing comment on contemporary life: we are what we consume – chocolate, spaghetti, peanut butter and jelly, curry and pepper. In his Postcards from Nowhere series, the artist recreates popular travel scenes from collaged postcards and then re-photographs them – a comment on the ubiquitous tourists of the world, indiscriminately collecting postcards and pictures.
Sérgio Sister lives and works in São Paulo. Since 2009 he has manipulated the detritus of the city, using wooden fruit crates in an ongoing series: Caixas. The crates—or slatted wooden boxes—are taken apart, painted in saturated monochromatic colors and recombined in various configurations that closely resemble the original structure and are thus haunted by their intended utilitarian use but are transformed into minimalist statements of rough-hewn color and form. The first Caixas were found objects. Presently, they are dressed in a woodshop, primed and painted and assembled for the first time, a simulacra of a simulacra.
Additional resources
- Flickr: Installation images