One of the most important authors of visual poems of Brazil, the Bahia-born artist Almandrade, opens an exhibition at Roberto Alban Gallery on June 18th.
Between geometry and concept, form and word, space rigor and poetry; thus goes the work of the plastic artist Antonio Luiz Morais de Andrade, Almandrade, Bahia’s exponent of conceptual Art and, today, one of the great names of the Brazilian visual arts, with a nationally and internationally renowned production. From June 18th to July 18th, a representative part of this production may be seem at Roberto Alban Art Gallery, selected by the French curator Marc Pottier, integrating the exhibition Entre a Palavra e o Conceito (Between the Word and the Concept).
With around 40 years of artistic activity, Almandrade needs no introduction. His work, initiated amid the creative vigor that marked the artistic production of the 1970s, has a very particular feature: it represents the universality of art itself, alternating between the European constructivist aesthetic and the concrete and experimental art (also known as neo-Concretism) that exploded in Brazil in the 1950s, sustained by names such as Amilcar de Castro, Lygia Clark, Ferreira Gullar, Helio Oiticica, among others.
In Bahia, Almandrade was alone in his engagement to constructive and conceptual art. Still, he had his merit recognized by the very exponents of the movement in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo - Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica, for example – and earned the respect of critics. His works, subject of at least 30 solo shows, were part of four editions of the São Paulo Biennial and today are in important private collections in Brazil and abroad, besides museums such as Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia, Museu Nacional de Belas Artes (Rio de Janeiro), Pinacoteca Municipal de São Paulo, Museu Afro (São Paulo) and Museu Nacional (Brasília), Museu de Arte do Rio Grande do Sul, among others.
Recently, Almandrade, invited by the curator of the Inhotin Institute, Rodrigo Moura, carried out with great success the Projeto Solo at SP-Arte 2015 (São Paulo International Art Show). At ART Rio 2014 (Rio de Janeiro Art Show), Almandrade had his work selected among the ten best works exhibited at the event, by Pablo Leon de La Barra, curator of Latin American Art of the Guggenheim Museum and current director of Casa França Brasil in Rio de Janeiro. Besides, his work attracted the interest of a group of curators of MOMA (New York) who came to Salvador to see it. The artist was also invited to participate in the Bienal Tridimensional do Rio de Janeiro, which takes place next September, when one of the sculptures that are part of this exhibition, will be displayed at Museu Histórico Nacional.
Entre a Palavra e o Conceito (Between the Word and the Concept)
“This exhibition is a cutout of his work elaborated in more than four decades of use of the object of art to stimulate thinking and provoke reflection according to criteria based on rationality, materiality and, not by chance, in the economy of data, without letting concepts supersede the artistic doing”, summarizes the exhibition’s curator, Marc Pottier, who certifies Almandrade’s work as result of a proposal “that has always differentiated itself from the art produced in Bahia”…”If Bahia is his origin, his work has international vocation”…
Architect, Master in Urban Design, Almandrade identifies an international moment of recognition and valorization of visual poetry, process poem, conceptual art and constructive trend carried out by artists from several countries along the 1970s, with Brazil as one of highlights in this field. “Everything I produced in postal art, visual poem and object poem seems to be looked in different ways. There’s a tendency to research and give space to our production in contemporary art, understood exactly as the expression of an art that proposes a more universal dialogue than limited to Brazil”.
The exhibition occupies Roberto Alban Art Gallery’s three exhibition rooms, where the various supports and languages used by the artist can be seem; visual poems, drawings, paintings, installation projects, sculptures, objects. Some of these works are documents of a decade between the AI5 in 1968 and the end of the dictatorship in the beginning of the 1980s. In the artist’s trajectory there’s the strong mark of a production that reinvents itself, flirting with the contemporary, the thinking and with the universal aesthetic.
Exhibition: Entre a Palavra e o Conceito (Between the Word and the Concept). / Almandrade
Opening: June 18th 2015, at 8:00pm
Hours: June 18th to July 18th 2015 (Monday to Friday, 10:00am to 7:00pm; Saturday, 10:00am to 1:00pm)
Venue: Roberto Alban Art Gallery
Address: Rua Senta Pua, 53 Ondina
Phones: + 55 71 3243-3982/ 3326-5633
Press agent
Antonio Moreno - Companhia de Comunicação
Phones: + 55 71 3247-5851/88921119
Entre a palavra e o conceito
Almandrade
Exhibition18/June to 19/June, 2015