The exposure Maria Bonomi: the art of loving, the art of resistingThe exhibition, currently on display at the Paço Imperial in Rio de Janeiro, invites visitors to an immersive experience. More than 250 works are distributed across 11 rooms of the historic mansion, covering seven decades of production. The curatorial team of Paulo Herkenhoff and Lena Peres proposes a non-chronological, almost spiral, journey in which the works intersect, reverberate, and re-actualize themselves. The artist emerges whole: multifaceted, coherent, and contradictory, like the history of modern and contemporary Brazilian art itself.
Right from the entrance, the exhibition establishes a dialogue between time and matter. Engravings coexist with geometric paintings from her early career, works from her youth are mixed with sculptures. Each revisiting suggests the awakening of new layers of meaning. Bonomi never repeats herself; she expands. In her words: "To engrave is to wound and, at the same time, to reveal." This physical, tense, and poetic gesture is the axis that runs through the entire exhibition.
The exhibition title announces the two vectors of his life and art.: To love and to resist. To love, in the sense of creating, caring, and sharing. To resist, in the sense of remaining, defying time, and reinventing oneself. At 90 years old, Maria Bonomi continues to make art a laboratory of experiences.
Trained in Europe, and later a student of Lívio Abramo in São Paulo, Bonomi has always considered printmaking as a territory. Wood, metal, cement, and fiber are her allies. The act of printing is also a way of thinking about space, of creating a relief between the visible and the invisible. As Herkenhoff observes, “in Maria, the act of printing is not repetition, but multiplication.” Each print is a new birth, an attempt to rewrite time.
The retrospective, and not the retrospective as Herkenhoff prefers, brings together historical works, such as Boats and moons, a woodcut from 1956, with constructive influence, and Robat Stone (1974), presented at the last Venice Biennale (2024), when Bonomi was invited to participate in the edition, whose theme was Stranieri Ovunque (Foreigners everywhere)). Also present are large-format color woodcuts produced from the 1970s onwards, among them... Tropicalia, which is featured on the catalog cover. The collection stands out. Capercaillie (2005), the knife dance, made of Nepalese handmade paper, and the Epigrams, Objects in copper, aluminum, and brass created from the 1980s onwards. In them, the artist transforms metal into writing, into visual thought. Textures gain a voice and relief becomes language.
The experimental video Paris Rilton (sic)The 2011 work, created by Bonomi and directed by Walter Silveira, with a soundtrack by Cid Campos, satirizes the futility of consumerism and celebrity. The artist presents a hollow sculpture, made of cast aluminum, with grooves that evoke sensuality and social criticism. Humor and acerbity combine to dismantle the myth of instant beauty, exposing the emptiness of a society fascinated by appearances.
In 1996, MASP presented Woodcut: from folk literature to the gallery, under my curatorship, bringing together 600 works from artists, collectors, and institutions. It was a landmark in the appreciation of Brazilian printmaking. On that occasion, Haroldo de Campos wrote Praise of Xilo, a manifesto-poem about the clash between body and matter. The text came to life in a video directed by Walter Silveira, with the voices of Haroldo, Beth Coelho, and Arnaldo Antunes, transforming the poem into a sensory experience. Bonomi herself was on screen, engraving woodcuts in her studio, making the gesture visible. The result was the book. Praise of Xilo, a collection of woodcuts for collectors.
The artist's relationship with literature, poetry, and theater is also highlighted in works such as Quadrants e Love inscribedThese works reveal a poetic subjectivity, a territory where art merges with life. The subtle eroticism and amorous ideals of these works reflect the encounter between Maria and Lena Peres in 2004, a relationship that inspired series such as... Love layers e LenaIn them, the artist transforms affection into visual architecture. It is love as structure and resistance, as Herkenhoff said: "For Maria, art is a phenomenon surrendered to the perception of the other, for the projection of meanings."
Bonomi's connections to the theatre have always been strong. In the largest and most diverse room of the exhibition, pieces of scenic elements, made for the play, are on display. Peer Gynt, (1971), written by Henrik Ibsen, They float in the air. The textuality of the avant-garde is felt through the gaze and the audacity of the questioning forms. The woodcut Palco (1962), which may refer to the theater of Samuel Beckett, proves Bonomi's continuous involvement with theater since the 1960s. His work expands, contaminates, and allows itself to be contaminated by texts from writers such as Clarice Lispector, his friend and confidante, with whom he shared transgressions, gestures, and utopias.
In the following rooms, the visitor encounters the artist in different roles: creator, activist, architect of public spaces. Her trajectory is intertwined with the history of the country. From decades of repression to redemocratization, from the experimental art of the 1960s to the present, Bonomi has witnessed social transformations with lucidity and courage.
Revisiting Maria Bonomi is also revisiting this history. Her public works, scattered throughout squares, subways, and buildings, are an extension of a collective thought. The artist builds for others, for the gaze of passersby. These are works that breathe the city and dialogue with daily life, transforming urban space into a playful experience. In works such as those at the Sé subway station, the Memorial da América Latina, or the Igreja da Cruz Torta in São Paulo, Bonomi incorporated the working-class world, transforming public space into an extension of her poetic, social, and collective perspective.
Herkenhoff and Peres' curatorial approach avoids a closed narrative. Instead of chronology, a network of associations is presented. The works do not explain themselves; they respond to each other. There are echoes, intervals, and correspondences within them. Each room is a field of forces, a territory of agreements, contradictions, and returns. The visitor is invited to circulate, get lost, and find themselves among gestures, materials, and questions.
The exhibition not only revisits a career, it celebrates an attitude towards life. Bonomi's consistency. It lies precisely in the contradiction, in the ability to change without losing control, and this is clear in this retrospective. Her art and life are made of persistence, but also of ruptures, when the situation demands it. In times of acceleration and banality, Maria Bonomi reaffirms art as permanence and seriousness. The art of loving, the art of resisting. It's not just the title of the exhibition; it's his way of life, always. As demonstrated at the end of the visit, Bonomi represents a bridge between the classical technique of engraving and the traits of contemporaneity.
“I feel privileged to occupy the Paço Imperial between two such distinct curatorial approaches: one delirious and distant, the other rational and intimate. The variety of media and stages presented reaffirms my purpose of sharing processes born from the same creative flame. Everything vibrates in motion. It is eighty years of incessant searching, an act of surrender, not yet a mission accomplished.”
