Frans Krajcberg
Nature
Curated by the artist
October 17 – December 14, 2008
OCA building
Av. Pedro Álvares Cabral, no #, Gate 3
Approximately 65 sculptures and 40 photographs by the father of ecological art in Brazil warn of illegal fires in the Amazon
Together with the exhibition MAM 60, the São Paulo Museu de Arte Moderna will also stage Frans Krajcberg: Nature in the Oca building, free of charge. In the exhibition, Brazil’s pioneer of ecological art revisits the premises put forward in the Negro River Manifesto among approximately 65 sculptures and 40 photographs made and chosen by him. Krajcberg is the artist to whom homage is being paid in MAM-SP’s 60th birthday celebrations.
In the Manifesto, signed together with Pierre Restany and Sepp Baendereck in 1978, the conceptual foundations are laid for a new environmental and existential awareness, called naturalism. The idea is that art, like human beings’ environmental vision, be stripped of ambitions for power in any area in which it is found (social, political, religious), in order to find a new, sharp sensibility, free of judgment and directly related to the clarity and readiness of perception.
Humankind should open its sensibility to the sovereign role of nature as a structure that encompasses everything, including the human domain, wherein it becomes free to interact both with the environment and with other people in a direct, benevolent way. Social structure and daily worries of a material or “scientific” order, that is, realism (as it is described in the Manifesto), cease to be necessary in order for people to feel a new environmental awareness, which is not just a concern with the production of pollutants and self-sustainability, but a new way of interacting with the world and others.
In this scenario, nature acts as a catalyst for the purification of the senses and thought, in all its force and magnitude. Contact with virgin forest (in the case of the Manifesto, written in the upper Negro River, en route to the Amazon Forest) enables people to tap into the vital energy inherent to the world and everything in it, which cleanses the senses.
These concepts are translated by the works in the exhibition, whether in photographs that simultaneously decry fires illegally lit to burn off parts of the forest and suggest nature’s endless capacity for regeneration, or in sculptures of varying dimensions, often colossal (the tallest in the exhibition stands 6 meters high), made from harmonious combinations of organic materials, extracting beauty without supplanting their pre-existing natural forms. Some of the works have never been shown before.
Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, OCA building
Exhibition: Frans Krajcberg: Nature – underground
Curated by the artist
From October 17 to December 14, 2008
Address: Av. Pedro Álvares Cabral, no #, Gate 3
Tel. (11) 5083-0519
Hours: Tuesday to Sunday and holidays, 10am to 6pm
FREE ADMISSION
Site: www.mam.org.br
On-site parking
Further information for the press:
MAM
Luciana Pareja (imprensamam@mam.org.br) (11) 7200 4131
Tel.: (11) 5085 1337
Oca
Maria Cecília Florence (cecilia.florence@conteudonet.com) 8833 8218
Tel. (11) 5571 1945
Conteúdo Comunicação
Roberta Montanari (roberta.montanari@conteudonet.com) (11) 9967 3292
Cláudio Sá (claudio.sa@conteudonet.com) (11) 9945 7005
Tel. (11) 3093 7800
