exhibit info

$Opening: February 21, 2007, 6-8PM Exhibition: February 21, 2007—April 02, 2007 Piola NYC 48 East 12th Street www.piola.it --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- PRESS RELEASE Brazilian artist Thereza Simoes’ exhibition BEFORE at Piola NYC features a selection of nine large acrylic paintings the artist has produced over the last ten years. Working from small photographs found in books and magazines, the paintings shown here are part of a series of portraits of the Sioux Chiefs of North America and of the Nambikwara tribes of the Amazon. The present paintings’ fierce palette of deep blues, pure greens, washed-out reds and grays, bright yellows, reaffirms the artist’s intrinsic and groundbreaking connection with light and color. “Photographs are the departure to freedom for my art, the escape to a different world through painting, a departure to a world where only myself and the image will go. The image knows and reveals. Very few images I select, very few images select me. After this peculiar selection, with the canvas on the floor, a double process begins and continues till the end. I respect what I am told, I listen. We are silent. I sleep by the canvas during the night, I turn the light on, we recognize each other. It can take time, I lost the notion of it. The end will speak for itself, we both know it is over.“ ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Thereza Simoes (b. 1941 - Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) Thereza Simoes began her career in 1960 when she joined E.P.Luna Publicidade, a small graphics company where she designed match books covers for night clubs and menus for restaurants. In 1964 she enrolled at the Institute of Belas Artes in Rio, under the orientation of the abstract painter Ibere Camargo. Her first paintings, done in oil on canvas, were inspired by images from her memory of the cattle that she used to track on horseback at her uncle’s ranch in the south of Brazil. In 1966 she produced paintings inspired by photographs published in magazines, particularly those of wounded American soldiers returning home from Vietnam. These were shown at the Museum of Modern Art (MAM) in Rio at an important show organized by Jean Boguici, entitled Opiniao 66. The following year her paintings depicting American automobile design, then a rarity in Rio, were also shown at MAM. In 1968 her work was notably featured in the show A Nova Objetividade Brasileira. Later that year she held a one-woman show at the Galeria Copacabana, featuring acrylic media on canvas. The basis for her work came from snapshots of her childhood, which she interpreted and organized in horizontal stripes called Faixas da Memoria. She also exhibited in the Sala de Arte Moderna group shows in 1966, 1967 and 1968. The medium for this later work was ecoline on eucatex wood boards. Thereza continued to explore other media and began creating objects using a mixture of painting and sculpture. For inspiration she turned to layered memories of sights and sound of Brazil; its Indians, lakes, and the Tupi language. These pieces were shown at the Salao da Bussola at the MAM. She was awarded a prize for this work, and some of her pieces were acquired for MAM's permanent collection. In 1969, the year of Castelo Branco’s military coup, she became involved with filmmakers of the Cinema Novo, working on film credits and posters. She designed the posters for two Julio Bressane films: O Anjo Nasceu and Matou a Familia. One of her pieces which had been shown in December of 1968 was selected for the Bienal da Bahia. Unfortunately it was confiscated by the military censor for political impropriety. Another show—Do Corpo a Terra—in Belo Horizonte and organized by Frederico de Morais, was also closed by the military. In 1970 she was invited to show at the prestigious Petite Galerie in Ipanema, owned by Franco Terranova. She invited two of her peers, recently arrived from Brasilia to the art scene in Rio; Cildo Meirelles and Guilherme Vaz. Each of them was provided one week at the gallery. Thereza displayed rubber stamps that protested censorship. She also stretched canvasses that she refused to paint. Instead they were explained by suggestive titles of scenes, landscapes, portraits, and so forth, such that the public would engage the work through their imagination, in clever subterfuge of the military regime. When Guilherme opened his portion of the show, the police arrived promptly and closed the gallery. This set the stage for the move to New York City, where Thereza would reside from 1970 to 1981. In the New York of the 70`s Thereza lived in Soho with her American husband, Andrew Smith. Her son Raul was born in 1974, and they moved to a big loft on Great Jones St. She met Rudi Stern and began working at his gallery, Let there be Neon. Here, her focus and inspiration shifted to neon lights, a medium that would preoccupy her for the next twenty years. Simultaneously she met abstract expressionist artist Phillip Pavia, who invited Thereza to his workshop at the New School, where she studied and made marble sculptures, some of which were subsequently displayed at the Roy G. Biv Gallery in 1975. While attending class, caring for her son, and working at the neon gallery, she managed to produce a show in Rio at the Paulo Bittencourt Gallery. This show consisted of neon landscapes mounted on wooden boxes. In 1979 she was awarded a commission to make all the neon signs for the Brazilian Fiorucci flagship store in Rio, which catalyzed her return to Rio. The Fiorucci installations generated a demand to work with neon signage, so Thereza opened a small company called Novos Usos, together with arquitect Jaime Bastian Pinto. The company was featured in many fashion and design magazine articles. She also exhibited her work at the Funarte Gallery, and the Cezar Ache Gallery, both shows consisted of neon installations and pieces. In 1996, as the neon industry went into decline, Thereza left the city of Rio de Janeiro and moved to a sparsely populated forest area in the mountains of the Mata Atlantica, a coastal forest area in danger of extinction. She continues to live there today, where she is recuperating the native forest and protecting the native animals. In recent years, Thereza has returned to painting. Several different styles of painting belong to this period, and some of the work is displayed here today. Occasionally she travels to New York, or accepts neon commissions which take her temporarily away from the working in the forest, from her books, her music, and her silence—all praised and loved these days. ARTIST STATEMENT “This show has brought together some of my paintings inspired by the Indians and their lives, just a fraction of my contact with certain aspects of them. The paintings here are from different years: those that represent aerial views of camps of the Bororo tribe, Brasil, are the big colored canvas ones and were done around 1993. They were inspired by the tribes’ social organizations and the urban result of it, (the camps—division into two different areas for the two clans, the center for the men of the tribe, the women were fixed on the sides and the men born on one of these sides could only marry women from the other half, avoiding inbreeding). For this show we selected three aerial views. Also the ones I worked on inspired by the photos of Edward Curtis during his last visit to the North American tribes in the late nineteenth century, when he had the Indians Chiefs wear their ceremonial dress. From those we selected five of the Sioux Chiefs. I painted them in 2000 when I first saw the printed images in books. I imagined who they were and tried to capture and represent their spirits, I also employed the same process with the photos of Claude Levi-Strauss visit to small scattered tribes in Brasil, in the thirties, from those we selected two showing Indian women with child from South American tribes, the Madonnas, again the focus is on receiving and translating something beyond the photographs...from these we chose two,…I cannot say precisely when they were done, the process is always a long one; that the fixing of images in memory and then keeping that inspiration, till the moment you do realize them. I named the show BEFORE, a wide concept word that explains all that, also my time and the time of these Indians, their camps and the World…How it was…BEFORE”$ shapeimage_3_link_0