With its wealth of museums and cultural centers, and an ever-growing number of art galleries, São Paulo is a cultural hotspot all year round, but more certainly during SP-Arte. The city’s art fair, founded in 2005, has quickly become the largest art market in Latin America. Despite the recent exit of some international galleries and concerns about rising energy prices, inflation and the reshuffling of US banks, this year’s event continued the trend of post-pandemic revival.
“The change of government that recognizes the importance of the Ministry of Culture [dissolved under the former right-wing president]focuses on issues of global importance, such as human rights, on climate and environmental concerns, but also on protecting the origins of peoples and vulnerable populations, puts us back on the international stage,” said the director of SP-Arte, Fernada Feitosa. , commenting on the impact of the results of last year’s presidential election on the cultural sector.
Feitosa highlighted the greater inclusion of indigenous, black, female, and LGBTQ+ Brazilian artists as one of the fair’s growing strengths. So, while perhaps less global, the event also felt more regionally inclusive and integrated into the city. His new space, Casa SP-Arte, which occupies the round house designed in 1936-38 by artist and architect Flávio de Carvalho, Casa SP-Arte – part of a larger housing complex, Vila Modernista – has opened with a performance by Hélio Oiticica, and will feature exhibitions throughout the year.
César Oiticica Filho and Neville D’Almeida at the opening of Casa SP-Arte. Photo by Denise Andrade.
Jochen Volz, artistic director of the oldest art museum Pinacoteca de Estado de São Paulo, which inaugurated a new building, Pina Contemporary, in March 2023, noted the growing importance of the fair in shaping the narratives presented in the collections. institutional. “Our acquisitions do not follow commercial trends, [but] we take advantage of the visibility of the fair to introduce our supporters to specific works of art that are truly relevant to the museum’s collection,” he said. “A museum like the Pinacoteca constantly needs to actively and publicly revisit the stories of Brazilian art that we tell and those that have remained silent for too long. The art market follows these canonical revisions.
Collectors Monica and Fabio Ulhoa, who first collected Brazilian art in the 1980s, a period when the market was centralized in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, are an example of national collectors who embraced art popular and indigenous. “Nothing is more contemporary than indigenous art,” said Fabio Ulhoa after attending the fair. “The developed countries cease to be the centers of legitimization of a supposedly universal art. We live in an interesting time of decolonization, of which Aboriginal art is one of the most vivid expressions. To collect it is to live in our present time. At SP-Arte, indigenous artists, such as Denilson Baniwa, Jaider Esbell (1979-2021) and Daiara Tukano, who hail respectively from the Baniwa, Makuxi and Tukano peoples of the Amazon, were represented by established galleries A Gentil Carioca and Millan.
SP–Arte 2023. Credit: SP–Arte 2023 disclosure.
Meanwhile, among galleries representing black Brazilian artists, prominent São Paulo gallery Luisa Strina sold new figurative works by Panmela Castro (represented by the gallery since 2022), and Mendes Wood DM brought to the fair features works by late-career artist Sonia Gomes (who had her first solo exhibition at Pace Gallery, New York, last year), and artist and art educator Antonio Obá.
Obá’s drawings around postcolonial themes and hauntingly delicate mystical images of sacrificial suffering were simultaneously on display in the gallery’s warehouse in the Barra Funda neighborhood. Also in the neighborhood – markedly low-key and less gentrified than the Jardins and Faria Lima areas of the city – the collectively run Galleria de Artistas (Gda), hosted festive open studios and a show by Raphael Escobar, and the Fortes D gallery ‘Aiola & Gabriel opened two exhibitions, including that of landscapes by Antiguan artist and writer Frank Walter. The two shows – that of Escobar who skilfully recounted through the media Cracolândia de São Paulo, the neighborhood that concentrates homeless drug addicts, and that of Walter tinged with the anguish of the diasporic passage – helped the aura around the fair to feel less socially claustrophobic.
In the historic city center where Cracolândia is located, the artistic association Pivô has opened two exhibitions. Janaina Wagner Baleia Fantasma refers to the portrayal of hunger in Brazilian New Wave Cinema. Between us: 10 years of the IMS/ZUM prize commemorated the award given annually by photography magazine, ZUM and by the Moreira Salles Institute. In Pivô’s cavernous concrete space in the iconic Copan building, designed by Oscar Niemeyer and adjacent to dilapidated and noisy streets, visitors could admire works such as Eustáquio Neves’ haunting archival investigations into the beginning of the 20eeugenics and criminology of the -century, and the poignant journal of Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro on the lives of black homosexuals, The anatomy of water.
SP–Arte 2023. Credit: SP–Arte 2023 disclosure.
After visiting SP-Arte, GdA and Pivô, collector Thiago Tannous praised the curation of the fair, and its invocation of various contexts and works. “I also think that some young Brazilian artists deserve to be highlighted for their position back at the fair, for example, Bruno Baptiselli, who exhibited last year as part of GdA [which he also co-founded] and returning this year represented by Luisa Strina,” Tannous said. Tannous also found the initiative of SP-Arte remarkable, Showcasecurated by Carollina Lauriano, which spotlighted Panmela Castro, young Indigenous LGBTQ artists Uyra and Laryssa Machada, and others, alongside established artists Claudia Andujar, whose exhibition, “The Yanomami Struggle”, is presented at Shed in New York, as well as Rosana Paulino and Emanuel Araújo
Returning to the Biennale building where SP-Arte takes place, part of the Niemeyer-designed modernist Ibirapuera Park complex, which includes the Afro Brazil Museum and MAC-USP, has brought home the vitality of living the first-hand art. Among the secondary market stalls, Gomide & Co elegantly combines geometries and pop with Brazilian folk art. Popular artists such as Chico da Silva, whose magnificent retrospective is currently at the Pinacoteca de Estado, Cícero Dias and Madalena Santos Reinbolt have lent a textural sensuality to Niemeyer’s austere curvilinearity.
Taking it all in, I couldn’t help but remember the title of the current exhibition, “Parábola do Progresso,” (“parábola” meaning both a “parable” and a “parabola” in Portuguese) at the SESC Pompeia, an industrial and cultural space designed by Italian-born architect and curator Lina Bo Bardi who championed Brazil folk art. Like Bo Bardi’s practice, the fair contained the seeds of a more expansionist view of Brazilian modernity and art as a winding parable: a complex entanglement of indigenous, black-transatlantic, and European histories.
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