He holds a master's and doctorate in Philosophy from FFLCH-USP. A professor in the Department of Arts at FAFICLA-PUC-SP, he is the chief curator of the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo and coordinator of the research group in Art History, Criticism and Curatorship (CNPq). He has published numerous texts on art, including in the catalog. Schendel sight (Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Pinacoteca de São Paulo and Tate Modern, 2013). He was chief curator of the Brazilian Museum of Sculpture and Ecology (MuBE, 2016-2020), assistant curator of the Brazilian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015) and adjunct curator of the 8th Mercosur Biennial (2011).
about
Photography—especially modern photographic experiments—is well represented in the collection of the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art. Artists such as Alberto da Veiga Guignard (1896–1962), Geraldo de Barros (1923–1998), and Thomaz Farkas (1924–2011), who worked between the 1940s and 1950s, the period of the institutionalization of modern art in Brazil, were central to the renewal of photographic language.
The discussion about figuration and abstraction that dominated the art of the period is manifested in the work of Geraldo de Barros, especially in the series Fotoforma, from the 1950s, in which he uses techniques of solarization, manipulation, and superimposition of frames. His work is similar to the Constructivist avant-garde, Cubism, and Abstraction.
Thomaz Farkas's gaze frames urban space through geometric shapes and previously unusual angles. His photography aims to break with traditional compositional patterns by choosing the everyday life of large urban centers like São Paulo as its subject, creating images that straddle the documentary and the geometric, drawn from Brazil's own urban landscape.
Alberto da Veiga Guignard, instead of focusing on geometric constructive art, looks to surrealist tendencies, bringing up discussions of the real and the imaginary, the conscious and the unconscious, through photomontages that open up a mystical universe far removed from rationalism. More than mere recording, modern photographic experiences are a way of imagining and inventing new ways of relating to the world.
You can continue your visit at the Mário de Andrade Library. MAM São Paulo, in partnership with BMA, is hosting the exhibition From book to museum, in the Tula Pilar Ferreira room. The exhibition explores the process of sedimentation of modern art in Brazil, based on both books and artists' editions and paintings, prints, and sculptures that reveal the debate between figuration and abstraction in the mid-20th century.
Cauê Alves and Pedro Nery
Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo
assistive media
Alberto da Veiga Guignard – Sem Título (1949)
Fotografia e vanguarda do MAM São Paulo
curatorship
Cauê Alves
Pedro Nery
He is a museologist and curator. He holds a degree in History and a master's degree in Museology from the University of São Paulo, where he worked as a researcher and curator at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo (2011-2019), organizing retrospectives. Rosana Paulino: Memory Sewing (2018-2019) and Marepe: Strangely Common (2019). He is currently a museologist at the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo (MAM São Paulo) and collaborates in the implementation of the museum's Documentation and Memory Center.
service
| Exposure: | Photography and the avant-garde at MAM São Paulo |
| Location: | Newspaper Library of the Mário de Andrade Library (R. Dr. Bráulio Gomes, 139 – Republic, São Paulo – SP) |
| Curatorship: | Cauê Alves and Pedro Nery |
| Exhibition period: | October 4 to December 7, 2025 Admission: free |
| Entrada: | Free |
| CHECK THE INDICATIVE RATING |