Exhibition "Chimeric Engraving", by Natali Tubenchlak

A Brazilian Engraving Gallery open the exhibition Chimeric Engraving, individual of Natali Tubenchlak, curated by Ana Carla Soler e Talita TrizoliFeaturing works produced between 2011 and 2026, the exhibition traces a fifteen-year overview of the artist's trajectory in printmaking and marks the first time that a selection of this breadth of the artist's graphic production has been presented in São Paulo. The exhibition runs until September 26, with free admission.

With a hybrid production by nature, Natali Tubenchlak's artistic practice, from a feminist perspective, highlights that the female body is never just a supposedly neutral body, but rather a space of tensions between languages ​​and desires, and that often it doesn't even reach the level of being human. These are images in which women become plants, animals, and even organs parallel to their corporeality, materializing other possibilities of experiencing female existence in the world. "It's perhaps a desire to be more a part of nature than of human issues," the artist says in an interview in the book "Natali Tubenchlak: Ecofeminism and Pornopolitics".

Not surprisingly, it is through printmaking, a technique with which the artist demonstrates complete familiarity and mastery, that it is possible to understand the compositional and logical operation that governs the formation of these hybrids, these contemporary chimeras in which the female body is the matrix, the central axis, but also the terrain of mutations, unfoldings, and subversions. The necessary juxtaposition of different matrices to obtain an image, or even the various layers of intervention in a single printmaking matrix, allows for a correlation with the interpolation of animal, vegetable, and human parts in the construction of these almost monstrous entities in the artist's prints.

The exhibition explores different techniques of metal engraving. From aquatint and etching, the starting point when Natali returns to the Engraving Workshop at the Museu do Ingá in Niterói, where she had her first contact with the medium in the 1990s, to drypoint and collogravure, a technique to which she has dedicated herself more intensely recently.

In "Staying with the Problem – Making Relatives in the Chthulucene," Donna Haraway revisits and deepens Spinoza's question about bodies from a more situated perspective. She develops the notion of becoming-with, which extends Deleuze and Guattari's becoming-animal by taking seriously not only the abstract potential of transformation, but also the singular and specific relationships between real species and their encounters, their histories, and their everyday interdependencies. She proposes that delimited individualism, the idea of ​​a self-sufficient human being separate from the natural world, has become truly unthinkable.

What Haraway calls sympoiesis (making-with), as opposed to autopoiesis (making-alone), describes the fundamental condition of all living beings, in which nothing exists or is constituted in isolation. Bodies, in Haraway's view, are always the result of encounters, entanglements, and contagions between species. Within this vocabulary, Natali Tubenchlak's figures become recognizable. The women in the artist's work grow out of themselves and become infused with what they are not, building kinship with the plant and the animal.

Among the series presented are "It's Been Like This Since I Was a Girl," which delves into this territory, adding to the body the accumulated memory of what the world imposes on women since childhood. The "Montaria" series stages the long history of representations of the female body oscillating between object and subject, in works that move between the erotic and the political, recorded with a clinical and sarcastic eye. In her most recent works, such as the collogravures of the "Desvairada" and "Mata Atlântica Dramática" series, the artist radicalizes the synthesis between body and natural world. The figures become denser and surrendered to fusion. The dilemma of where the human ends and the vegetal begins ceases to be formulated, as the bodies have finally found their form.

Identifying with animals, with plants, with that which exceeds the so-called hegemonic human form is a way of escaping and making visible the power norms imposed on bodies – and Natali Tubenchlak's hybrid bodies are not mere metaphors for a thought about nature, but rather a properly material thought, embodied and imprinted. The curatorial work of Ana Carla Soler and Talita Trizoli presents a historical and thematic journey through the artist's production, expanding on the question that drives her body of work: what é and can to be A body?

Ana Carla Soler and Talita Trizoli
July 2026

Service
Exhibition | Chimeric Engraving
From August 15th to September 29th
Tuesday to Friday from 14am to 18pm, Saturday from 11am to 13pm