"Raw State" montage. Photo: Fabio Souza/MAM Rio

Ua selection of 126 works from the collection of Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro (MAM Rio) transforms the Monumental Hall and some areas of the institution's third floor into a kind of sculpture garden. Bringing together works by 107 artists from different times, places and languages, Gross State reveals the breadth and diversity of the museum's collections.

The largest exhibition of sculptures ever mounted by MAM Rio is curated by the artistic directors Keyna Eleison and Pablo Lafuente and assistant curator Beatriz Lemos, and seeks to become familiar with and reflect on the institution's collections and the stories created from them - continuing the proposals presented in 2020, in the appointments of Eleison, Lafuente and Lemos to their respective positions. Based on the arrangement of the works in the space, the show brings special focus to the volume generated by the processes of patrimonial accumulation. "Gross State deals with the sculptural materiality and environment of a museum's technical reserves. Here we are interested in highlighting the accumulation as a point of reflection and enhancing the image of the crowd”, explains the assistant curator.

Thus, those who visit the exhibition are faced with a very subtle division of the works by nuclei, which corroborates the main purposes of offering an overview and raising a question about the effects that the processes of collecting and heritage conservation have on the writing of stories. about art and culture.

The construction of these narratives also involves the “presences and absences” of the museum, as pointed out by Keyna Eleison. in his inaugural speech. Among the 126 works exhibited in Gross State, 24 pieces had not been exhibited for over 20 years. The public's contact with these offers the possibility to think about ways of sharing – and sometimes forgetting – this heritage. In the exhibition, the works are accompanied by information that tells us the moment of inclusion in the MAM Rio collections and the number of public appearances during the last two decades – “data that are part of the knowledge systems that give rise to the writing of the history of the museum and, by extension, of the many histories of art”, explain Eleison, Lafuente and Lemos in the curatorial text. For them, the exhibition of these works is a way of reviewing these stories, which are always partial, and which “are in a continuous process of rewriting”.

The multitude of sculptures also points to another relationship. “The montage allows us to experience another spatiality between the spectator and the works, by bringing large sculptural volumes at ground level or in groupings by nuclei”, evaluates Beatriz Lemos. Providing a walk through the different poetics of the works of Amilcar de Castro, Auguste Rodin, Celeida Tostes, Cildo Meireles, Constantin Brancusi, Franz Weissman, Lina Kim, Lygia Clark, Márcia X, Maria Martins, Mestre Didi, Nelson Leirner, Nuno Ramos and Tunga - among many others -, "Gross State proposes an encounter between different bodies, including the public, at a time when bodies need to move away”, completes Keyna Eleison.

GROSS STATUS
WHERE: 
MAM Rio – Av. Infante Dom Henrique, 85. Aterro do Flamengo – Rio de Janeiro (RJ)
WHEN: May 6th to August 29th, 2021.
Thursday and Friday, from 13 pm to 18 pm. Saturday and Sunday, from 10 am to 18 pm
TICKETS: Suggested contribution, with free access option. Adults: R$ 20. Elderly, children and students: R$ 10. Schedule your visit by clicking here.



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