MAM São Paulo at the Pinacoteca do Ceará: figure and landscape, word and image | São Paulo Museum of Modern Art
Exhibitions
The São Paulo Museum of Modern Art was founded in 1948, and its collection, with an emphasis on Brazilian art, boasts over 5,000 works produced by the most representative modern and contemporary artists. Like its collection, MAM's programming prioritizes experimentalism, embracing the plurality of current artistic production and the diverse interests of contemporary societies. Traditionally, the museum maintains a broad range of activities that include courses, debates, a research laboratory, video screenings, 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 a limited edition, at least one of which 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 were previously duplicated in the collection.
MAM at the Pinacoteca do Ceará: Figure and Landscape, Word and Image is an exhibition that builds on this donation and features 47 works from 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 from different languages and technical procedures, such as photography, woodcuts, silkscreen printing, painting, drawing, sculpture, embroidery, video, among the most varied combinations and derivations. This contingent of diverse materials and artistic practices reflects the multidisciplinarity that characterizes Brazilian art and, thus, seeks to offer visitors plurality as a way to reflect on and engage with art and its inherent issues.
The relationship between figure and landscape is addressed in the first section of the exhibition, which brings together works that develop different perspectives on an issue dear to the history of art and the transformations promoted since the modernist avant-garde. In some works, the presence of figures in front of or amid landscapes, or before empty spaces, challenges us to reflect on how bodies and portraits connect with the space and world around them, and how the boundaries between subjects and the natural and artificial landscape can be blurred. 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 apprehension of written language in the context of an image-based construction. Every word produces meaning through a mental image, just as some images can be understood through their connection to writing and as visual language. In the works featured in the exhibition, these relationships are reconfigured as words and letters, alongside other compositional elements, contaminate one another, highlighting 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 the Pinacoteca do Ceará. It aims to increase the visibility of both museums' collections and contribute to the Pinacoteca do Ceará's programming, as well as foster reflection on modern and contemporary art.