Group exhibition "Do It Yourself"

The collective exhibition Do it yourself, at Almost space, an independent venue that has been gaining prominence in the São Paulo scene. Artists from different generations are put into dialogue with works by Anthony Dias, carried out in the 1970s. The exhibition highlights the importance of the work of the artist from Paraíba, fundamental for an interpretation of contemporary Brazilian production.

The curatorship of Erica Burini selects seven videos from the series The Illustration of Art (1971-1974) and also the album Record: The Space Between (1971). “Antonio Dias was an artist who researched the various media in which his work was circulated, from newsprint to Nepalese paper, from high reproducibility to unique works. During this period, there was also a clear irreverent critique of the art system in his production, using artistic language itself to do so,” explains the curator.

The exhibition features a wide range of artists, with works by André Komatsu, Cris Peres, Graziela Kunsch, Jaime Lauriano, Jorge Menna Barreto, Kauê Garcia, Marco do Valle, Pablo Vieira, Raphael Escobar, Renata Lucas, Tiago Gualberto, Vanessa Soares, Vitor Cesar and Yná Kabe Rodríguez. There are those from a time closer to Antonio Dias, such as Marco do Valle (1954-2018), and younger ones, such as Yná Kabe Rodríguez, who, in her early 30s, investigates a possible relationship between the figure of the jaguar and that of the transvestite, as desired and hunted, arousing fear and desire.

The Marco do Valle Institute has been recovering the memory of the artist, who participated in the XVIII and XX São Paulo International Biennials. Pieces from the series Three non-collinear points determine a plane (Euclides) (1979) will be exhibited, which uses common materials such as PVC, casters, rubber and wood to produce floor sculptures with a nonsense regarding movement. Rubber balls with casters stop moving, while tubes gain mobility when fitted with a caster. The recontextualization of the function of a piece with each use brings the work of Valle and Dias closer together.

Do It Yourself also features the work of mid-career artists with national and international recognition, such as André Komatsu and Jaime Lauriano. Komatsu is showing Ruído retórico_1 (2021), a work that also deals with the displacement of a common phrase, “Tudo vai bem”, which also refers to the 1972 film by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin. The words are engraved on a white MDF board, a material often used in the construction of stage sets, alluding to a reading of the phrase as a farce.

While Lauriano presents works from the series Experiência concreto, in which he deals with the citation of concrete and neoconcrete procedures with a material update that proposes a greater approximation with common Brazilian life, pointing out the limits of the movements that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. In Experiência concreto #5 (seven lines), the Gestalt theory mobilized in paintings such as that of Geraldo de Barros, is applied in a parallelepiped volume drawn on the wall with black silver tape.

The exhibition borrows a fragment of the title of Antonio Dias' famous work, Do It Yourself: Territory Freedom, which in turn reproduces the phrase that has been circulating in North American industry since the beginning of the 10th century. The work is part of the Project-book: 10 plans for open projects, conceived in 1968 by the artist, with instructions for the delimitation of territories and the construction of monuments. Drawings such as graphic schemes of these projects would accompany Dias until the end of his life in woodcuts, paintings, silkscreen prints and even offset.

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Group exhibitions | Do it yourself
From September 28th to October 19th
Tuesday to Saturday, from 14:19 to XNUMX:XNUMX