Reviews

Collectors, investors and artists are fascinated by the promising profitability of NFTs. The phenomenon exploded with the succulent sale of a digital work by Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) in 2021 and since then it has generated a chain reaction whose consequences are still not entirely clear.

Reluctantly classified, with increasing complexity and interest, the work of Maria Martins (1894-1973) has yet to gain recognition in her native country. But a selection of some 50 pieces, on display in Rio de Janeiro through June, should help reposition the sculptor, draftswoman and engraver in the pantheon of leading Brazilian artists.

A few decades ago, the art utopia consisted of incorporating the viewer into the work, either physically or sensorially. Frank Popper called these practices with the term "participation art".

The Cartier Foundation presents "Heliotropo 37", the first major exhibition in France dedicated to the work of Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide. It brings together more than 200 images from the 1970s to today. Photographs from the most iconic to the most recent, as well as a color series specially produced for the exhibition. If today she is famous for her portraits of the Indians of the Sonoran Desert, the women of Juchitán, or for her photographic essays on the ancestral communities and traditions of Mexico, Graciela Iturbide also draws an almost spiritual focus to landscapes and objects. Showing for the first time these two facets, these two points of view of the artist's work, the exhibition thus offers a renewed vision and reveals her great contribution to photographic art.

Ronald Morán's individual exhibition, Por encima del Jardín (Above the Garden) (2021-2022), with which public activities were reinstated at the Marte Museum in San Salvador, has become a paradigmatic exhibition, not only as a new consecration of one of the Central American artists of greater international recognition, but as a sign of the vision of an institution that is committed to experimentation and accompaniment in the practices that link contemporary art and social imagination.

This exhibition features thirteen photographs by Gory from the Moonlight Serenade series (2012-2018). The essay by the curator Julia P. Herzberg discusses the varied contexts of the photographs, which are exhibited and discussed here for the first time.

One of the key works of the 34th São Paulo Biennial literally anchors the robust and uncomfortable presence between the interstitial areas of this modernist building, so questioned today. However, its meanings go beyond the perimeters of the construction and extend to, for example, some of the civic sculptures that populate public places throughout Brazil and that are also located in the surroundings.

With the curatorship of Félix Suazo, Pinta Miami 2021 becomes a scenario for immersive and thought provoking installations. The aim of Pinta’s section Special Projects is to accentuate the individuality and artistry of contemporary artists who, through their works and installations, bring to life the concerns and possibilities of the near future.

Recently, Richard Garet, a multimedia artist based primarily in New York City, opened a solo exhibition titled “Frame Compositions” with 1stDibs NFT marketplace. The eponymous show exhibits 29 vibrant NFT works and explores the relationship between color, light, surface and form. Garet’s practice encompasses sound installations, performance, computer applications and other mediums. Adhering to strict parameters, he creates compositions by carefully selecting high-definition 1080x1080-pixel square frames one-by-one and then collating 60 per second using computer applications. Because each work contains 1800 frames squeezed into a 30 second time period, the eye can no longer identify individual frames, thus, creating moving images.

“Moving with great fluidity between spirituality, the production of visuality, academic reflection and political action, Heráclito is explicit when he says that he wants to ‘act, in a symbolic way, on the devastating consequences of racism and social inequality that affect the black populations'." In this way, the curator and researcher Solange Farkas (Videobrasil and ex-MAM Bahía) summarizes the approach to the production of Ayrson Heráclito, a Bahian artist who won a retrospective at the MAR (Museu de Arte do Rio) and who had an important recent solo show at the Simões de Assis Gallery, in São Paulo.

In the interest of paying tribute to one of the photographers who contributed in building Argentina's visual identity, Francisco Medail dedicated the Artista Homenaje section in BAphoto to Lucrecia Plat. Working with an extensive archive of portraits, conceptual photographs and the collaboration of Clara Nerone, Medail highlights the important role of archives in the conception and appreciation of contemporary art.

Geometries Reimagined, the title of the inaugural exhibition at the Tanya Brillembourg Art space, inquires the way in which the incessant transformation of the abstract forms imagined since cave art, is once again realized in the works of Colombian Juan Raul Hoyos, Guatemalan Tepeu Choc, and Haitian Marcus Blake. By different means, the three of them confront the form that, since the onset of the 20^th century, generated the whole current of geometric abstraction imposing itself, according to Rosalind Krauss, as "the emblematic image of the modernist ambition" [1]: the grid. Its presence, explicit or tacit, continues to be unraveled and remade incessantly in contemporary art, and it is no stranger to that "schizophrenia" which, as Krauss wrote, arises between its concentration on the materiality of the pictorial surface and the undeniable spiritual tension that its mythical geometry contains [2]. No less is the opposition between the "discursive silence" sought in the grid through the "complete liberation from naturist appearances" [3], and the paradoxical conversion of its geometry form ─inexistent in nature─ into the matrix of urban modernity: Mondrian ended up creating Boogie Woogie, 1943, in allusion to the rhythm and pulsating vibration of New York.

In her first solo exhibition at the Deering Estate, Amalia Caputo considers how we construct nature and explore a site around systems of visual classification. Every Being is an Island is an immersive exhibition that serves as an extensive portrait of the native subtropical environment of South Florida.

The flows of architecture and circulation in continuous movement set the tone for the new commissioned and individual works that are exhibited now at the Inhotim Institute. There are three projects as the result of almost two years of inactivity, without openings, in the immense space of the cultural center located in Brumadinho, in Greater Belo Horizonte, capital of Minas Gerais. It is a mix between a botanical garden and a refuge for contemporary art works specially developed for the institution or that have been reformatted in this special exhibition context that extends over an old estate, now with 140 hectares of visitation.

Lydia Rubio was born in Havana, Cuba, with art in her bones. She comes from three generations of women painters, to be precise. "My grandmother painted every day, whenever she could," Lydia recalls. "She worked at an office but painted in the living room. The whole family lived together, so I used to see her painting there and was trained visually. My cousin, everybody was drawing and painting, but I was the only one that took it to another level of development and commitment."

José Luis Landet has been searching for the image of the Latin American landscape for years. And in El Atajo (The Shortcut), the exhibition that he presents in Marco, he finds some ways of approaching that idea. He builds ramps, connects vestiges, shreds colors, traces identikits, joins random images, creates an alphabet ... and ends up building a total idea of ​​our landscape, but above all of another subject that also haunts him: the painting. There is a large installation, a physical shortcut, and a set of 467 works that point to something that is clear in the subtitle: a displacement in the author.

Invisible Threads, Evelyn Politzer’s solo exhibition at the Miami Dade College Hialeah Art Gallery, curated   by Noor Blazekovic of Irreversible Projects.

ArtMedia Gallery, Miami

In the 15th edition of Pinta Miami, from December 1 to 5, 2021, Vivian Galban will participate with her installation, Exhibition in Real Time, which consists of a human-scale camera obscura where the visitor will first be portrayed and then invited to participate in the development process. Three works by the Argentine artist and photographer are briefly analyzed below as an introduction to her work.

The experimentation of the process, the disappearance of the portrayed and the invisible moment.

The 322 pieces that make up Espíritos sem nome (Nameless Spirits), a retrospective dedicated to the production of the Bahian Mario Cravo Neto (1947-2009) at the São Paulo headquarters of the Moreira Salles Institute, attest to his vigor as a visual artist; With the robustness of his work, he permeates media beyond photography, since he produces pieces in languages ​​such as cinema, the three-dimensional, drawing and publishing, among others.

Is a visual manifesto possible? How to show the possible dialogues between art and education? How many images are within each image? How many words are in each word? What's in between? With these questions, the Argentine artist Marina De Caro introduces us to her exhibition Tierra de las emociones perdidas (Land of Lost Emotions), at the Ruth Benzacar gallery in the city of Buenos Aires, which brings together her most recent production.

Artists who have that ability to approach and distance themselves from reality have always caught my attention. Ronald Morán, (Salvadoran) is one of them; in this case, he offers us a double distancing: the distancing of a mimetic tradition that recycles reality with repeated images to the point of vertigo and, on the other hand, the distancing forced by the Covid 19 pandemic.

The narratives of the Brazilian avant-garde in the arts go through an intense revision. Due to the centenary of the Week of 22, the emblematic event that in the thesis launched the foundations of modernity through different languages​​and fields of activity in the country, three exhibitions currently on the billboard rotate and bring new elements from the production of two icons of Modernism in Visual Arts - Tarsila Do Amaral (1886-1973) and Di Cavalcanti (1897-1976). In addition, they cast more emphatic lights on three not-so-famous characters within the journeys within the movement and the modernist winds: Antonio Gomide (1895-1967), John Graz (1891-1980) and Regina Gomide-Graz (1897-1973) .