Submission deadline: October 31, 2023, 8am
Tunga, whose actual name was Antônio José de Barros Carvalho e Mello Mourão, was a sculptor, draughtsman and performance artist, born in Palmares, Pernambuco, Brazil, in 1952. His erudition and philosophical background was reflected in an increasingly conceptual artistic output, which involved the intersection with research in different knowledge fields and a dialogue with literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis and theatre, and even with exact sciences and biology. His powerful, profound and self-referential work denies linear time and relies heavily on materiality, symbologies and processes of transformation and metamorphoses.
Tunga was one of the most important artists on the Brazilian art scene, and the first contemporary artist to exhibit a work in the Pyramid of the Louvre. He participated in key exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale, in 1982, and Documenta in Kassel, in 1992. Today the artist’s work is part of museum collections, including MoMA, in New York; the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston; Centre Pompidou, in Paris; MACBA, in Barcelona; and Tate Modern, in London.
The Tunga Institute was created in 2017 shortly after the artist’s passing, as a non-profit organization whose objective is to study, preserve and disseminate the artist’s legacy. In the last 6 years, in partnership with galleries and museums, the Tunga Institute has realized 6 major exhibitions about the artist’s work and actively collaborated on 4 publications.
The Tunga Institute’s current challenge is the development of the artist’s catalogue raisonné—a bilingual, online publication that offers free access to the complete two-dimensional works by the artist.
With the support of Banco Itaú and the Basic Sanitation Company of the State of São Paulo (Sabesp), Tunga’s catalogue raisonné will bring together all two-dimensional works by Tunga, organized by theme, medium and chronology, as well as their references: citations and/or reproductions in books, newspaper clippings, letters, photographs, and exhibition catalogues.
The Tunga Institute has also started the certification of two-dimensional artworks by the artist, through a precise identification and authentication process.
Owners of two-dimensional artworks are invited to get in touch by e-mail at cr [at] institutotunga.com.