Marina Abramovic at Luciana Brito Galeria

Back to Simplicity
18 November 2010 – 29 January 2011

Rua Gomes de Carvalho, 842
Vila Olímpia, Brazil
T (11) 3842 0634
Opening Hours:
Tuesday to Friday, from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Saturdays, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

www.lucianabritogaleria.com.br


Luciana Brito Galeria is delighted to announce the exhibition Back to Simplicity by Marina Abramovic. Born in Belgrade, former Yugoslavia, in 1946, Abramovic has contributed in a fundamental manner for the consolidation of performance as a form or artistic expression, in the course of the three decades of her career. Since the 1970's, Marina Abramovic's work has explored and tested, by means of countless performances, the human limits, both physical and mental. In Brazil, the artist has participated in the São Paulo Biennales of 1981, 1985 and 2008; the Mercosul Binennale, in 2005; the exhibition Balkan Erotic Epic, carried out at SESC-SP in 2006, curated by Adelina von Fürstenberg; and the solo show Transitory Object for Human Use, carried out at Luciana Brito Galeria, in 2008..

Besides a set of historical artworks, including videos and photographs that document performances the artist has presented since the 1970s, Abramovic will show her recent works from the series "The Kitchen" (2009) and "Back to Simplicity" (2010).

"The Kitchen" is a set of videos and photos made in Spain, in the abandoned spaces of a kitchen (with an extraordinary architectural design, constructed during the Franco regime) in a convent of Carthusian nuns who fed more than 8000 orphans when the convent was active. Although the work is born as an homage to Saint Teresa of Avila—who in her writings tells of an experience of mystic levitation in the kitchen—it becomes above all an autobiographical work, considering that, as the artist herself states in the interview included in the catalogue: "In my childhood the kitchen of my grandmother was the center of my world: all the stories were told in the kitchen, all the advices regarding my life were given in the kitchen, all the future-telling through the cups of black coffee took place in the kitchen, so it was really the center of the world, and all my best memories come from there."

The series "Back to Simplicity"—Marina Abramovic's most recent work, never before shown in Brazil—arose from the need to reestablish the artist's contact with nature, in its simplest and most immediate forms, after the cathartic experience of Abramovic's three-month-long performance piece entitled The Artist is Present, presented at a recent solo show at MoMA New York. In the words of the artist: "after I had been looking at one thousand six hundred and seventy five pairs of eyes, after that incredible human connection, I needed to be connected with nature. (...) Being under a tree, holding a lamb for two days, in complete joy, that's what Back to Simplicity is all about."

A catalogue including relevant critical texts about the artist’s oeuvre by Klaus Biesenbach and Arthur C. Danto, previously unpublished in Portuguese, and an interview by Jacopo Crivelli Visconti will be issued and distributed free to the visitors, and later to libraries and museums, rendering the artist's work accessible to an even wider audience.