Soft Modernity
LiMac / Galeria Leme / Art Basel Miami
December 1-6 / 2015
With: Luciano Figueiredo, Sandra Gamarra y Mauro Piva
Galeria Leme invites the artist Sandra Gamarra to design its booth for Art Basel Miami. Through her fictional museum project, LiMac, she curated an exhibition through a selection of three artists from the gallery. The exhibition is entitled Modernidad blanda (Soft Modernity) and revisits the Brazilian modernist heritage through the lens of 3 Latin American contemporary artists.
Luciano Figueiredo, one of the protagonists of the 1970s counterculture movement in Brazil (alongside Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica), has been exploring spatial and chromatic features, which take root in Brazilian Concrete and Neo-Concrete Art. By making structured composition with several layers of canvas with painted geometric patterns, Figueiredo simultaneously alludes and subverts the compositional principles stipulated by the modernist canons.
In turn, Mauro Piva’s paintings on paper carefully reconstruct abstract works that subtly refer to consecrated Brazilian artists such as Alfredo Volpi, Judith Lauand, Willys de Castro, among others. With indirect allusions to recognized historical pieces, Piva tests to what extend we can identify them by altering their most recognizable features.
Finally, continuing her recycling of other artists’ ouvres, Sandra Gamarra appropriates key works from the main protagonists of the Modernist period and continues her research on the consequences of modernism in South America. By doing so, she enlarges LiMac´s Bamba Collection, that consists of paintings copied from the photographic registration of sculptures, installations and videos found in contemporary art publications.
The space was designed so that it appears to be a museum entrance, a souvenir shop and an exhibition room.