Exhibition "Masks, Ivald Granato – Who are you?"

A DAN Gallery opens the exhibition Masks, Ivald Granato – Who are you?, curated by Maria Alice MillietThis unprecedented exhibition brings together a collection of paintings created by Granato in the late 1990s and places them in dialogue with African masks preserved in the collections of Christian-Jack Heymès and family MastrobuonoThe opening takes place in São Paulo and connects to the agenda of the 22nd edition of SP-Arte.

The exhibition starts from a central point for understanding Ivald Granato's career. For decades, his public presence, his performance art, and his irreverent energy have played a decisive role in the reception of his work. This aspect is unavoidable, but it does not define it entirely.

Granato was also a painter of great technical mastery, an exceptional draftsman, and a profound connoisseur of art history. He moved between languages ​​and repertoires with rare intimacy, not to repeat styles, but to challenge them based on a very unique visual intelligence. Maria Alice Milliet recalls that, upon reaching maturity, after more than three decades of exhibitions, awards, and recognition, Granato already occupied a prominent place in the Brazilian art scene. A talented draftsman and painter, he had traversed the “isms” and Pop Art in close harmony with his time.

This exhibition helps to bring this point back into focus, situating it as part of a consistent investigation in which painting, memory, theatricality, and identity intertwine. In the late 1990s, Granato temporarily distanced himself from the more immediate confrontation with contemporaneity and turned his gaze to deeper dimensions of his own formation. It is from this movement that the series linked to masks was born. According to the curator, this passage corresponds to an inflection point in his career, when the artist sought values ​​linked to the past, to ancestry, and to Brazilian cultural memory. In 1998, Granato created a series of paintings on paper called The Mask. Subsequently, he developed larger works gathered under the title Who are you – The Mask. For the artist, these masks were visual annotations of faces that populated his imagination.

In addressing this production, Maria Alice Milliet shifts the usual interpretation that tends to associate this type of repertoire solely with the European tradition of modernism. In Granato's case, it is linked to the search for cultural roots and the desire for identity affirmation. The curator recovers her mixed-race origins, with Black and Indigenous ancestry, and inscribes this series within a field of belonging, symbolic recognition, and reverence, marked by an approach that arises from within. This aspect is crucial for understanding the exhibition. African ancestry appears as a structural force in Brazilian culture and as a key to reinterpreting an important part of her work.

Milliet observes that, after an initial foray into figures closer to a popular and carnivalesque universe, Granato returns to tribal masks. In the series whose question organizes the exhibition's title, we see a succession of strange faces emerging from dark backgrounds, in compositions that condense graphic intensity, chromatic energy, and a strong symbolic charge. Representation has a particular weight in this collection. It is a figure of passage, a condensation of gesture, an invention of persona, and a ritual presence. Ten years after his death, Masks, Ivald Granato – Who are you? helps us understand the artist's complexity more clearly.

Service
Exhibition | Masks, Ivald Granato – Who are you?
From March 28 to June 25
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday from 10:00 AM to 7:00 PM, Saturdays from 10:00 AM to 1:00 PM