Isabelle Borges connects Bahia with the German vanguard in her first big show in Salvador
The Bahia-born artist reflects about space and intertwines artistic segments at Roberto Alban Art Gallery
The effervescent Berlin’s scene, in Germany, that lives a special moment in terms of production and creativity, adds to the restlessness of the visual artist Isabelle Borges in a reflection about time and space, exploring different concepts and artistic expressions. The result is the exhibition, L'espace indicible - O espaço inefável, which opens on October 18th at Roberto Alban Art Gallery, in Ondina. It is the artist’s first big show in her hometown, despite her international recognition. The exhibition is open to the public from October 19th to November 20th.
Born in Salvador, Bahia, Isabelle Borges studied plastic arts at Parque Lage, in Rio de Janeiro, from 1989 to 1992, attending classes with the professors Beatriz Milhazes, Daniel Senise and Charles Watson. In 1994, she decide to move to Europe, precisely to Cologne, Germany, where she acted as an assistant at the atelier of Antônio Dias and Jack Ox, American. From the following year until 1997, she studied at Düsseldorf Art Academy, where one of her mentors was Christian Merget, one of the Grupo Zero’s founders.
Isabelle Borges has lived in Germany for more than twenty years. Regardless of the geographical distance from her country of origin, the artist embodies in her work striking characteristics of an international art rooted in two continents.
The concept of “ineffable space”, which occupies a central place in Le Corbusier’s architectonic theory, has exercised a considerable influence in Isabelle Borges’ production. Her work unfolds to dialogue with space. The works are designed for the environment they live in and where there are no more limits to the disciplines architecture, drawing, painting, sculpture. Borges’ work has finally abolished the edges.
Besides the canvases, the artist also explores the walls as part of her art. She explains that she sees the work as a fragment of the whole. “With space as the research’s focus, it’s almost like a logic development that the work “leaks” to the real surface of the wall”, says Borges. “As I carry out many drawings using lines, plans and paper clippings, I see the wall as an extension of painting or even as a support in itself”, completes Isabelle.
Other pieces will equally reflect artistic reflections regarding the spatial lines, their limits and new meanings, and their connections with the different segments of contemporary art: from painting to sculpture, from drawing to collage, from object to installation.
To the scholar and art critic Paula Terra-Neale, who presents the show, Isabelle Borges’ work has a very personal language, even if in its geometrical and abstract universality. “She finds this balance of the ineffable space through the drawing that extrapolates the margins and goes to the walls, through the luminous poetry that is constructed in the play of colors that calmly emerge here and there against the black bands or the empty and white spaces”, says Paula, PhD in History and Art Theory from the University of Essex, United Kingdom, and a consultant and independent curator based in England.
International career
At the end of 1997, Isabelle Borges moved to Berlin, in Germany, where she has been living and working until now, and is constantly requested for exhibitions all over the country. The close familiarity with Berlin’s art scene, however, hasn’t prevented her work from incorporating striking characteristics of an art that is also rooted in Brazil. She admits a strong influence in her work of Concretism represented by names such as Hélio Oiticica and Ligia Clark, among many others.
In her trajectory, Isabelle carried out innumerous solo and group exhibitions, in German and in Brazil, as well as in China, the United States, Italy and Australia. Among her most recent exhibitions are Standart International,Geistberg- Loop Raum Berlin, Germany – 2015 / Interaktion , 27 Brazilian artists , Sacrow Castle, Posdam, Germany – 2015 / Kunsthalle PLU 41 – 2015 / solo show , SMAC- Art Space , Berlin , Germany, 2014 / Kunstverein Uelzen , Uelzen , Germany 2014 / Eigen + Art Leipzig, Germany , 2014/ Kunstverien Melle, Melle, Germany 2004 / solo show, Museu Brasileiro da Escultura , São Paulo, Brazil, 2013/ Kunstverien Ulm, Ulm, Germany , 2013.
Information
Exhibition: L'espace indicible - O espaço inefável/ Isabelle Borges
Opening: October 18th 2017, at 8:00pm
Hours: from October 19th to November 20th (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
Phone: + 55 71 3243-3982/ 3326-5633