July 16–August 29, 2015
Opening: July 16, 7pm
Galeria Leme
Av. Valdemar Ferreira, 130
São Paulo
Brazil
Hours: Tuesday–Friday 10am–7pm,
Saturday 10am–5pm
T +55 11 3093.8184
info [at] galerialeme.com
Galeria Leme has the pleasure to present SITU, curated by Bruno de Almeida. A platform of artistic production and research, the project inquires about the potential of a dialogue between art, architecture and the city, and its possible reverberations and contributions to a broader questioning of contemporary urbanity as a physical-social matrix.
This project invites a number of Latin American artists to, one after another, take hold of the external spaces of Galeria Leme’s building, devising temporary and site-specific works which relate both to the construction and to the adjoining public space.
The choice of this gallery is motivated, on one hand, by its project–commissioned to the Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha (Pritzker Prize, 2006) in collaboration with Metro Associated Architects–and on the other hand, by its complex history of construction, demolition, replication and expansion, which can be taken as a representation, on a small scale, of the evolutionary processes of São Paulo and of many other metropolises from the geopolitical south.
The curatorial focus falls upon artists whose researches gravitate around architectural and urban space issues, as well as other tangential topics. In addition, there is an emphasis on Latin American artists, as they have another bodily and intellectual understanding of space that comes from an intense familiarity with the complexity of the public sphere and of the urban and social processes that are specific to Latin America.
To design the first site-specific, SITU invites José Carlos Martinat.
Motivated both by the architecture of Galeria Leme’s building, as well as by the social dynamics of the city of São Paulo, the Peruvian artist creates his most subtle installation to date. Renouncing a physical occupation of the outside space of the gallery, he focuses on the immaterial flows, discourses and information that actively participate in the construction and contestation of the urban space.
In his installation, Martinat engenders an infrastructure that is imperceptible to the pedestrian. Converting the building into a camouflaged distributor of information about São Paulo, which is taken, in real time, from websites selected by the artist. After being printed, like tax receipts, the information is released to the outside of the building, where it can be read and carried by passers-by. With this gesture, the artist inquires the intrinsic capacity of inert elements in the city, such as buildings, to activate an engagement with the urban reality, understood beyond its physical form. Turning the viewer into a silent interlocutor and a carrier of information.
About the artist:
José Carlos Martinat, 1974, Peru. Lives and works in Lima, Peru.
Solo exhibitions: Pista 1, Revolver Galería, Peru (2014); Ambiente de Estereo Realidad #4, Gervasuti Foundation, Venice Biennial (2013); Ejercícios Superficiales sobre Dispositivos de Deleite, Galeria Leme, Brazil (2013), among others.
Group exhibitions: 12th Havana Biennial (2015); Permission To Be Global, Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2014); Project Space: Ruins in Reverse, Tate Modern, London (2013); 9th Shanghai Biennial (2012); 7th Mercosul Biennial, Brazil; 2nd Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan: América Latina y el Caribe, Puerto Rico (2009), among others.
Included in such collections as: Tate Modern, London; MALI–Museo de Arte de Lima; MALBA–Museu de Arte Latino-Americana de Buenos Aires; MoMA, New York, among others.
About the curator:
Bruno de Almeida, 1987, Brazil. Lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil.
Graduated from the Faculty of Architecture, University of Oporto, Portugal, and holds a masters degree in Architecture from the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio, Switzerland. Worked as an architect in London, and as a curatorial assistant at the Independent Research Institute, Fondazione Archivio del Moderno, Switzerland.
Click here for SITU.