Antonio Dias
dal 16/4/2013 al 21/6/2013
Segnalato da
16/4/2013
Antonio Dias
Mul.ti.plo Espaco Arte, Rio de Janeiro
Where the libido goes? A collection of 21 collages and watercolors by Dias, one of the most respected Brazilian artists. Paper here functions as a new environment in which the artist will intervene.
Mul.ti.plo Espaço Arte exhibits the rare collection – never shown before in Rio de Janeiro – of 21 collages and watercolors by Antonio Dias
A rare opportunity: from April 17th on the Mul.ti.plo Espaço Arte exhibits a collection of 21 collages and watercolors by Antonio Dias, one of the most respected Brazilian visual artists. Never before shown in Rio de Janeiro, the lot was purchased from a European collection. “It was wonderful seeing them gathered once again”, said Dias, who haven’t seen these works for over 25 years. “For Mul.ti.plo it was a pleasure to find this preciosity”, celebrates Stella Silva Ramos, one of the gallery’s owners. The art critic Paulo Sergio Duarte wrote the essay Where the libido goes?, which names the exhibition, to the book that will be released by Mul.ti.plo with all the exhibition’s works.
In one of his numberless trips around the world, Antonio Dias ended up in Pattan, Nepal, where he lived during five months. There he met artisans who manufactured paper and began to employ this Nepalese paper to resume to watercolor. “I define this work as one to rave, to divagate, to project the goal and practice the void”, he says.
“Paper here functions as a new environment in which the artist will intervene. But this is not any kind of environment; it has nothing to do with the white cube or a raw canvas, a public site or a building’s façade. He has produced it, he choose its texture and colors. More than that, he learned with the artisans, he choose its limits and borders, exactly as in the case of a boat, each work is a vessel that receives its destiny and its crew”, writes the art critic Paulo Sergio Duarte in the book’s introduction. The artist agrees: “Paper has always been for me the most interesting medium”.
In this 21 works on paper there are many of the solutions and ideas that turned Antonio Dias’ production into one of the most creative and recognized within the visual arts. “The spirit of watercolor has always been the artist’s lost of control over the medium”, says Duarte.
Where the libido goes?
Collages and watercolors by Antonio Dias
About Antonio Dias
One of the most recognized Brazilian visual artists, Antonio Dias recently had one of his works purchased by New York’s MoMA, the installation Invented Country.
Besides, he is taking part in two international exhibitions: an exhibition of Latin American art at the Hunter College of Arts, in New York; and the exhibition Order, chaos and the space between, at the Phoenix Art Museum, in Arizona, a group exhibition of Latin American art of the Contemporary Latin American Art, of Diane and Bruce Halle Collection.
Biography
Campina Grande, PB (Brazil) - 1944
Antonio Manuel Lima Dias (Campina Grande PB 1944). Multimedia artist. He learns from his grandfather the elementary techniques of drawing. During the last years of the 1950’s, in Rio de Janeiro, he works as an architecture designer and graphic. He studied with Oswaldo Goeldi (1895 - 1961) at the Atelier Livre de Gravura (Free Engraving Studio) of the National School of Fine Arts. In the 1960’s he adds words and phrases to his works. In 1965, at age 21, he is recipient of a grant offered by the French government as 1st prize in painting in Paris Biennial, and lives in the city until 1968. After, he moves to Milan, where he keeps his studio. In 1971 he edits the LP Record: The Space Between and begins the series The Illustration of Art. In 1972 he receives a grant from the Simon Guggenheim Foundation to work in New York. In 1977 he travels to India and Nepal, where he studies paper manufacturing techniques. He begins a series of works on artisanal paper, which are integrated to the work by their texture and mix of pigments. In Katmandu he publishes the wood engraving album Tramas (Meshes). In 1988 he lives in Berlin with a scholarship from the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst - DAAD. In 1992 he starts teaching at the Sommerakademie für bildende Kunst, in Salzburg, Austria, and, in the following year, at the Staatliche Akademie der bildenden Künste, in Karlsruhe, Germany.
Opening: April 17th, 7pm
Mul.ti.plo Espaço Arte
Rua Dias Ferreira, 417/sala 206 – Leblon - Tel.: 2259-1952
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Opening hours: from Monday to Friday, from 10am to 18:30pm Saturdays from 10am to 2pm
Admission free