EXHIBIT AT  ITAÚ CULTURAL REVEALS THE ONE THOUSAND AND ONE PHASES OF GERALDO DE BARROS' WORK IN A JOURNEY MARKED BY COHERENCE

From August 11 (Wednesday) through November 7, Itaú Cultural exhibits more than 400 items from the work and life of the artist who gives his name to the exhibition Geraldo de Barros – imaginary, construction and memory. It is the first time that an exhibition presents the collection of his work, without specific cuts. From fabulous to formal abstraction, going through methods and constructive principles between analogies and intersecting phases and techniques, the exhibition follows the artist's creation and production in five decades of work. A timeline unveils the creative and coherent process of a life of work, crossing the works and materials from the studio with the artist's personal archive, among family photos, letters, quotes and objects.  

The shared curatorship between Lorenzo Mammi and Michel Favre is complementary but is separated on the different floors of the Itaú Cultural exhibition space. For them, as a whole, Geraldo de Barros – imaginary, construction and memory, allows the visitor to immersively read about the life and work of this artist, making it possible to understand the coherence between all the phases in which he worked: engraving, photography, concrete and pop painting, furniture, and graphic art.  

The more than 400 items presented in this exhibition, make it the most comprehensive exhibition ever shown. They range from works in varied and mobile racks to dozens of documents and unpublished material from his personal archive. It also shows pictures that weren’t highly exhibited such as Arizona – pop art measuring over three meters by one and a half, made in enamel over offset in color and glued paper on particleboard, 1975 – and Minister II, in enamel and glued on particleboard, produced in the same year. They are among the works that the artist used to offer as a gift, all someone had to do was say that they liked it, and many of which have been lost.

“This is an exhibition in which we try to bring together the coherence of Geraldo's various phases and show how it has a life of its own,” says Mammi. “It ranges from the first prints inspired by Paul Klee, the photographs, the concrete and pop works to the Sobras (Leftovers). Guiding threads show that he is more complex than just a concrete artist or photographer. He is complete, has a broad and original vision,” he concludes.  

“The work of Geraldo de Barros has a vocabulary in which we realize that with just a few letters, he can tell many stories,” observes Favre, who, in addition to curating the exhibition, takes care of his father-in-law's rich archive, preserved in Geneva, Switzerland, alongside artist Fabiana de Barros, daughter of Geraldo and his wife. 

Born in Chavantes, in the interior of the state of São Paulo, in 1923, a very young Geraldo de Barros moved with his family to the capital, where he died in 1998.  He started working at the age of 14 to support his studies and he quickly developed a flair for painting. From 1945 onwards, he studied drawing studies with Clóvis Graciano (1907-1988), Colette Pujol (1913-1999) and Yoshiya Takaoka (1909-1978). And never stopped.  

Geraldo became a photographer, painter, engraver, graphic artist, furniture designer and drawer. He created collectives, such as the Rex and the Ruptura Group. As an exponent of experimental photography, he joined the Bandeirantes Photo Club (FCCB), the core of modern Brazilian photography. His trajectory permeates various forms of visual expression and claims the social role of art. Learn more about him in the Itaú Cultural Encyclopedia.
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You can also see images of the artist, belonging to the Itaú Cultural collection and in the Google Arts & Culture online exhibition Brazilian Modernist Photography, realized with a part of this institution's collection.

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‍Exhibition area
On floors 1 and 1S you will see Mammi’s  research and curatorship. He occupied himself with the imaginary and formal abstraction in Geraldo and the investigation of the constants of his constructive methods and principles, which were repeated throughout his career. In turn, Favre centralized the curatorial line on floor 2S, based on the artist's archive, listing works, documents and other materials, which reconstruct and problematize the different phases of his poetics.

On the first floor, Mammi presents the artist's works based on the influences of Paul Klee, whose production he discovered in 1948, and the artists of the Engenho de Dentro Psychiatric Hospital, whom he met in 1949, thanks to critic Mário Pedrosa and artist Almir Mavignier. The path is conducted here through photography, from juvenile experiments to the late production of Leftovers, including drawings, engravings and paintings from his different phases.  

Descending to the first basement, the reference is furniture design, under the sign of Max Bill, one of the most important and influential concretism designers of the 20th and current century, whom the artist met in 1951. In all, the exhibition features 31 pieces of furniture designed by Geraldo for the Unilabor and Hobjeto cooperative, established by him and Antônio Bioni in 1964.

Under Favre's hand, the second basement aims at portraying Geraldo’s  career intertwined with his life in a chronological, but not necessarily linear, way. The curator's intention here is to offer a panoramic view of his production, in order to highlight the relationships between the practices and periods of his personal and artistic life. Unlike the other two floors, in which quotes from critics like Mário Pedrosa and poets like Augusto de Campos permeate and line up the works, in this space the artist's own voice refers to his work. This material is the result of a meticulous selection of documents in Geraldo's personal archive. From this same place came the raw material to create his timeline.  

“Here we try to show the different phases of Geraldo's work in a linear way, but not as a mere timeline;” explains Favre. "There are pieces that allow us to show a little of his personality beyond the work, because, for the first time, we present a timeline with important data of his production, placing, side by side, the origin of the work and elements that participated in its creation, such as a sketch, a negative or furniture design project, and the actual complete work.”  

Thus, the space presents a crossover of audiovisual works, family photos, letters, studio material, techniques that the artist developed, such as photographic negatives and engraving matrices in order to demonstrate all his phases and unravel the process of how he worked, explored and created.  

“In this way, the experimentation, the search for material and techniques is perceived, in addition to his undogmatic openness of mind,” continues the curator. “The works go from scratched or perforated negatives shown in photos from the 50s, to studies of Formica from the 80s and the Leftovers, going from the final negative to the one that was cut and did not enter the photo, in a dialogue of the construction of these images.”