Pinacoteca de São Paulo, a museum run by the São Paulo State Department of Culture and Creative Economy, presents Marta Minujín: Live, the first retrospective exhibition in Brazil dedicated to Minujín, one of the most significant Latin American artists of her generation. Its guiding thread is the artist’s contribution to an avant-garde that thinks about Latin America both in micro- and macro-political terms. The exhibition, on display from July 29, 2023, to January 28, 2024, is curated by Ana Maria Maia and presented by Iguatemi.
Minujín achieved artistic recognition in the early years of her career, in the 1960s. Internationally recognized as the great pioneer of happening and participatory art, Minujín has been producing tirelessly to this day, shifting between different media, scales, and artistic and social circuits. With her mirrored glasses and larger-than-life personality, this artist features in important chapters of art history and has lived through new realism, pop art, conceptualism, public art, and multimedia art.
The show brings together more than a hundred of Minujín’s works from 1963 to the present and gives a new presentation to the iconic El Batacazo, first created in the Torcuato Di Tella Institute in 1965, as well as to works such as Galeria Blanda [Soft Gallery] (1973) and La caída de los mitos universales [The Downfall of Universal Myths] (1978-). At the Pina Luz parking lot, an inflatable structure will be welcoming the public on the first days of the exhibition. The Escultura de los deseos [Sculpture of Desires] (2022) is 15 meters high and was a great success at the Argentinian Lollapalooza.
“The exhibition celebrates the power with which her entire trajectory not only mirrors but also intensifies the forms of lived reality,” Maia shares, “‘Live’ is a phrase that alludes to liveliness, bodily presence, and even more directly denotes urgency in the vocabulary of mass media, a discursive and technological platform that has always attracted the artist’s attention. Whether in radio and TV broadcasts in the 1960s or on her Instagram channel today, Marta has created art as an excuse for herself and for all people to be able to express themselves with energy and freedom.”
The show ends with one of the artist’s most recent video installations, Implosión! [Implosion!] (2021). The new version of the work calls for the visitor’s immersion in a multicolored musical cube. The design is based on animated photographs of details of a historical mattress and reflects the artist’s perception that the present age is a barrage of sensory stimuli. The work’s circularity allows a glimpse of Minujín’s sixty-year career in its persistence and repertoire.
Marta Minujín: Live is sponsored by Vivo (Platinum Quota), Mattos Filho (Gold Quota), Ternium (Silver Quota), and Iguatemi São Paulo and Ageo (Bronze Quota).
Click here for more details on the featured works.
Photography by Levi Fanan.
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