Indepth Arts News:
"Geraldo de Barros / Vik Muniz"
2000-06-22 until 2000-09-24
Musee De l'Elysee
Lausanne, ,
CH Switzerland
Geraldo de Barros (1923-1998) was one of the
pioneers of abstract photography in Brazil. As was
evident from his exhibition Fotoformas in 1950 at
the then recently established Museum of Art of Sao
Paulo, he foreshadowed the geometric movement
of concrete art, of which he was to become one of
the main exponents in his country. His photographs
at that time reflected his fertile imagination, and
included prints from multiple-exposured negatives
and scratched, cut and cropped ones. He also
made photograms and drawings in Indian ink on the
film.
Everything was possible for this artist whose
enthusiasm reflected the cultural effervescence of
the young Brazilian democracy. He subsequently
went to Paris where he studied print-making,
abandoned photography and turned to painting.
On his return to Sao Paulo, his idealism
encouraged him to set up a collective enterprise for
the production of furniture which he himself
designed. In order to make products of high
aesthetic quality available to the largest number of
people, he naturally turned to industrial design and
graphism. Following an exhibition of Fotoformas at
the Musée de lElysée in 1993, Geraldo de Barros
resumed his experiments in photograpy, using his
own images of ski scenes in Argentina, landscapes
and family portraits as raw material, or as
ready-mades, which he cut, juxtaposed and
reworked with an astonishing sense of jubilation.
This series of compositions at the frontier between
abstraction and figuration is entitled Sobras, which
in Portuguese means remnants or left-overs.
The family of Geraldo de Barros has bequeathed all
his work to the Musée de lElysee, which is
delighted to have this opportunity to make it better
known in Europe. The exhibition is accompanied by
a monograph published by Editions Prestel,
produced in association with the Ludwig Museum in
Cologne and the SESC in Sao Paulo.
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