The Poetics of Waste

MON holds its first tribute exhibition, featuring artist Efigênia Rolim

The Oscar Niemeyer Museum (MON) is launching the first in a series of exhibitions and tributes dedicated to artists represented in the museum's collection. The new space, located at the end of the tunnel, will open on September 3rd with the exhibition “Efigênia Rolim: The Poetics of Waste.”

The exhibition brings together sculptures from MON’s permanent collection, such as “Guinea e as Três Marias” (Guinea and the ThreeMarias), “Vai o Carrinho com Cavaleiros e Anjinhos” and “Xamã(instrumento musical)” (Shaman musical instrument), as well as a video about the artist.

Born in Minas Gerais in 1931, the artist and storyteller became well-known in Curitiba after moving to the capital of Paraná, a city that embraced her and integrated her into its daily life and artistic scene. Efigênia Rolimpassed away in March 2026.

Her work emerges from simple, intimate gestures and a persistent, empirical ritual of reorganizing the world using what had been discarded.  Efigênia used to tell how, upon seeing a candy wrapper on the street glistening in the sun, she was enchanted by that simple beauty, seeing in the paper infinite creative possibilities.

Over the course of decades, the artist has developed a unique language that transforms waste - paper, plastics, fragments of everyday life - into vibrant compositions in which color, rhythm, and repetition become forms of resistance and reinvention. 

Far from any hierarchy between “noble” and “ordinary” materials, Efigêniaasserts an aesthetics of survival, in which every element carries memory, time, and possibility. Her works reveal not only formal refinement - evident in the meticulous organization of surfaces - but also an ethical principle: the rejection of waste as a rejection of oblivion.

This tribute exhibition offers an encounter with the power of the artist's creative practice. By bringing together a select group of works, the exhibition invites the viewer to slow down. Each piece, in its density, expands beyond its physical boundaries, suggesting narratives that traverse the everyday, precarity, and the imagination. There is an almost musical dimension to the work: patterns that repeat and vary, creating a unique cadence that is at once rigorous and intuitive.

To celebrate Efigênia Rolim is to acknowledge a journey that defies the boundaries between art and life. Here, what remains reinvents itself - and, in reinventing itself, insists on enduring.