The São Paulo Museum of Modern Art was founded in 1948 and its collection, which focuses on Brazilian art, includes over 5 works produced by the most representative modern and contemporary artists. Like its collection, the MAM's program prioritizes experimentalism, opening itself up to the plurality of current artistic production and the diversity of interests of contemporary societies. Traditionally, the museum maintains a broad range of activities that include courses, debates, a research laboratory, video sessions, and artistic and educational practices.
In 1986, MAM created the Collectors' Club, whose goals include enriching its collection and developing private collecting. Through the Club, artists at different stages of their careers are invited to propose works in multiple formats, for the production of a limited edition, of which at least one is incorporated into the MAM collection. In 2024, the museum began a review of its collection and donated to the Pinacoteca do Ceará a set of 87 works that had participated in different editions of the MAM Collectors' Club and that were duplicated in the collection.
MAM at the Pinacoteca do Ceará: figure and landscape, word and image is an exhibition that is based on this donation and features 47 works that belong to the MAM collection and are linked to modern and contemporary art. By bringing the MAM collection closer to the works recently acquired by the Pinacoteca, the exhibition brings together 94 works in different languages and technical procedures, such as photography, woodcuts, silkscreens, paintings, drawings, sculptures, embroidery, videos, among the most varied combinations and derivations. This contingent of varied materials and artistic practices reflects the multidisciplinarity that characterizes Brazilian art and, thus, seeks to offer visitors plurality as a way to reflect and relate to art and issues inherent to it.
The relationship between figure and landscape is addressed in the first section of the exhibition, which brings together works that elaborate different points of view on an issue dear to the history of art and the transformations promoted since the modernist avant-garde. In some of the works, the presence of figures in front of or amidst landscapes, or in front of empty spaces, challenges us to reflect on how bodies and portraits are linked to the space and the world around them, and how the boundaries between subjects and the natural and artificial landscape can be indeterminate. In other works, the appearance of landscapes devoid of figures, as well as ambiguous representations of the body and the spaces it occupies, or can occupy, destabilize crystallized meanings by introducing abstraction into the process of perceiving and signifying the world and the ways in which we relate to it.
The links between word and image are analogous to the relationships between figure and landscape and come into focus in the final section of the exhibition, where works containing letters, words and texts put into perspective the understanding of written language in the context of an image construction. Every word produces meaning through a mental image, just as some images can be understood through their connection with writing and as visual language. In the works gathered in the exhibition, these relationships are reconfigured as words and letters, alongside other compositional elements, contaminate each other, pointing to the impossibility of completely separating the reading of the image from the reading of the word.
This exhibition is the result of a partnership between MAM São Paulo and Pinacoteca do Ceará and aims, in addition to increasing the visibility of the collection of both museums, to contribute to the programming of Pinacoteca do Ceará, as well as to encourage reflection on modern and contemporary art.
Cauê Alves and Gabriela Gotoda
curators
credits: Xadalu Tupã Jekupé, Tatá Piriri (2022). Collection of the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo. Donation by Paulo Sartori