With each new exhibition, the Oscar Niemeyer Museum invites its public to be surprised. This time, Mexican artist Gabriel de la Mora challenges our gaze and perception with his paintings, installations and sculptures made from unusual, discarded items. 

Nothing in his intense and extensive work is obvious. This includes everything from the peculiar materials he uses to the execution processes and inspiration. Everything is the result of an insight into human nature, its feelings and sensations. 

In his creative process, he transforms found objects into raw material for unique works of art, evoking the concept of ready-made. There is always a message, addressing sustainability, the passage of time and the cycle of life, translated into works full of beauty and movement.

Upon entering the exhibition room, the public is confronted not only with works of art, but with a proposal to create new meanings. By discussing universal environmental issues, he makes us realize the many possibilities that art can take on. 

The result, although the result of a process of research and study, with great technical complexity, leaves no room for predictability and sounds intuitive. We are challenged to perceive something beyond the works. And that's what this exhibition invites us to do.

Juliana Vellozo Almeida Vosnika
CEO of the Oscar Niemeyer Museum

MON holds exhibition by Mexican Gabriel de la Mora

The exhibition “Veemente”, by the Mexican artist Gabriel de la Mora, is the Oscar Niemeyer Museum's (MON) newest project. The show, on display in Room 1 from May 8th, is curated by Marcello Dantas. There are 70 works, including installations, canvases with mixed techniques and sculptures, most produced between 2000 and 2025. 

The set shows not only the artist's aesthetic and its evolution, but also the diversity and peculiarity of the materials used, which go beyond traditional supports and pigments. In his creative process, he transforms found objects into raw material for unique works of art, evoking the concept of ready-made.

Gabriel de la Mora's practice involves an investigation into materials, exploring the physical and conceptual limits of a process of collection and reconstruction. At first glance, his works may seem abstract, sculptural or even minimalist. However, a closer look reveals that nothing is as it seems. De la Mora creates new and extraordinary surfaces that deconstruct the boundaries between different artistic languages.

His works are made up of unexpected elements: strands of hair, fragments of mirrors, eggshells, shoe soles, butterfly wings and other traces of everyday life. His technique denotes an almost obsessive process that transforms the raw material into new shapes, patterns and textures. The continuous repetition of the artisanal gesture - sometimes restorative, sometimes destructive - reveals a method that challenges the viewer's visual and sensory experience.

Gabriel de la Mora was born in Mexico in 1968 and surprised the art world by treating any material as an object of interest and creative power. His work aims to assign new symbolic and aesthetic values to the banal. As a collector of fragments of everyday life, he shows an unlimited fascination with the remnants of existence, putting together a puzzle that never existed.

This obsession with repetition and reconstruction is what defines the vehemence of his practice. In an exhaustive process, he seeks a visual expression that can only emerge from the infinite persistence of the gesture. 

The exhibition's expography reflects the artist's material obsessiveness by proposing an expanded sensory experience. At the Oscar Niemeyer Museum in Curitiba, a 400 m² room is filled with his works, while a large central table allows visitors to explore the materials of his creations.

The role of art is to transform the value of things - symbolic, material or imaginary. "Veemente" is an equation of visual and tactile perceptions. By allowing the public to interact with the materials and experiment with the limits of repetition and obsession, the exhibition invites each visitor to experience, in an intimate and sensory way, the logic of an artist who turns waste into visual poetry.

820 Fragments of Hypolimnas pandarus butterfly wings on museum cardboard
30 x 30 x 2 cm
Simões de Assis Gallery

Wooden sticks
28.6 x 22.3 x 15 cm
Private collection

Electronic panels on museum paper
41 x 35 x 4 cm
Private collection

Dust collected in the artist's studio
10 x 10 x 10 cm
Private collection

Acrylic on peacock feathers on museum cardboard
30 x 30 x 4 cm
Private collection

The exhibition “Veemente”, by the Mexican artist Gabriel de la Mora, is the Oscar Niemeyer Museum's (MON) newest project. The exhibition will open on May 8 in Room 1, curated by Marcello Dantas.

There are 70 works, including installations, canvases with mixed techniques and sculptures, most produced between 2000 and 2025. The set shows not only the artist's aesthetic and its evolution, but also the diversity and peculiarity of the materials used, which go beyond traditional supports and pigments. 

"Gabriel de la Mora's art provokes a fundamental reflection on our time and invites us to reframe the ordinary, to look more closely at what we have discarded or forgotten," says the Secretary of State for Culture, Luciana Casagrande Pereira. "It's an exhibition that dialogues with contemporary themes and reinforces MON's commitment to bringing the public powerful experiences connected to global art discussions."

MON's director Juliana Vosnika says that the artist challenges our gaze and perception with his paintings, installations and sculptures made from unusual, discarded items. "Nothing in his intense and extensive work is obvious. Everything is the result of an insight into human nature, its feelings and sensations," she says. 

In the process of creation, the artist transforms found objects into raw material for unique works of art, evoking the concept of ready-made. "There is always a message, addressing sustainability, the passage of time and the cycle of life, translated into works full of beauty and movement," says Juliana.

Curator Marcello Dantas explains that Gabriel de la Mora's practice involves an investigation into materials, exploring the physical and conceptual limits of a process of collection and reconstruction. "At first glance, his works may seem abstract, sculptural or even minimalist. However, a closer look reveals that nothing is as it seems," says Dantas. 

"His works are made up of unexpected elements: strands of hair, fragments of mirrors, eggshells, shoe soles, butterfly wings and other traces of everyday life," says the curator. "His technique denotes an almost obsessive process that transforms the raw material into new shapes, patterns and textures. The continuous repetition of the artisanal gesture - sometimes restorative, sometimes destructive - reveals a method that challenges the viewer's visual and sensory experience," he says.

Marcello Dantas is an award-winning curator who has worked extensively in Brazil and abroad. He works on the border between art and technology, producing exhibitions and multiple projects that provide immersive experiences through the senses and perception. In recent years, he has worked on the design of several museums, such as the Museum of the Portuguese Language, Japan House (SP), Museum of Nature (PI), Museum of the City of Manaus, Museum of the People from Sergipe (Aracaju, SE), Museum of the Caribbean and the Carnival Museum (Barranquilla, Colombia). He has held solo exhibitions of some of the world's most important names in contemporary art, such as Ai Weiwei, Anish Kapoor, Laurie Anderson, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Rebecca Horn and Tunga. He was also the artistic director of the Brazil Pavilion at Expo Shanghai 2010, the Brazil Pavilion at Rio+20 and the Pelé Station in Berlin for the 2006 World Cup.

Born in 1968 in Mexico City, where he lives and works, Gabriel de La Mora has a degree in Architecture from the University Anáhuac del Norte and has a master's degree in painting from the Pratt Institute in New York. He focuses his artistic practice on the use and reuse of discarded or obsolete objects, which seem to have completed their useful life. More interested in the deconstruction and fragmentation of an object or material over time, he bets on reconstruction from practices based on the passage of time and processes, echoing the ready-made concept.

Veemente - Gabriel de la Mora

Art and war seem like antagonistic words, but here they come together in this interesting set of 37 Afghan carpets from the personal collection of curator Victor Nosek. 

Held by the Oscar Niemeyer Museum (MON), the exhibition "Afghanistan - carpets of peace and war" is based on MON's permanent collection of works. Unlike other cultural institutions, a museum's role, in addition to caring for and expanding its collection, is to create dialogues between its works and the exhibitions it holds. This is one of the Museum's proposals.

It is worth remembering that MON has the largest collection of Asian art in Latin America, following the donation of thousands of works years ago by diplomat and professor Fausto Godoy, which marked a new curatorial vocation. 

Space was then made in the collection for Asian, African and Latin American art, in line with the great museums of the world, making it distinct from the Eurocentric tendency that dominates Western culture. This initiative has positioned MON among the great international museums. 

In this vein, we are now bringing to our audience the ancient tradition of Afghan tapestry, which in recent decades has incorporated war themes into its traditional designs. Both themes are presented in this new exhibition, divided into two axes: peace and war.

More than appreciating the aesthetics, the show touches us by its proposal and leads us to perceive the world through the provocative gaze of denunciation. It offers visitors this unique experience of searching for meaning and reflecting on such a complex subject through the beauty of art.

Afghanistan is one of the most politically sensitive regions on the planet. Nestled between such diverse giants as Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran and China, its geographic location not only places it at the crossroads of great civilizations but also of some of the most important religions on the planet: Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, mainly.

Afghanistan is home to a very ancient civilization, which already existed as a Persian domain when Alexander III of Macedon, the Great, walked through the region and founded Balkh, one of his most advanced outposts in Asia, in 334 BCE. Part of the population still retains physical traces of their ancestral Greeks. This same population, with equally ancestral habits, is made up of a large cast of ethnic groups and tribes that resulted from the occupation by invaders of various origins – Persians, Greeks, Mongols, etc. – throughout their history, which have instilled, both genetically and in deep-rooted traditions, values ​​and concepts that each of them defends with fierce zeal.

Proud of their roots, these ethnic groups and tribes, which are divided between the Sunni and Shiite branches of Islam – approximately 90% are Sunni and 10% Shiite, roughly speaking – do not accept the preponderance of any other over them, no matter how large it may be in number, even though the Sunni Taliban, of the Pashtun ethnic group, currently dominate the government and public life and oppress other ethnic and religious groups. Afghans are even less accepting of interference from other cultures, and they remember the period when two of the largest empires of the 19th century, the Russian and the British, fought for hegemony over Central Asia in the region, which history has recorded as the “Great Game”.

It was this same spirit of resistance that was ignited in December 1979 when the Soviet Union, heeding the call of the communist government then in power in Afghanistan, invaded the country to support it in the fight against the mujahideen insurgents, made up of groups that rebelled against the oppression of the Marxist creed, which they understood to be a degradation of the values ​​of Islam. This was because the Soviets sought to impose their secular concepts, locked the mosques and prevented public worship. The resistance took on dramatic proportions when the Soviets abandoned Afghanistan in 1991, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, leaving room for the intensification of confrontations between the hardened militants who had taken refuge in the mountains that make up the country's rugged geography. At the same time, Western troops from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), led by the United States, occupied the country after the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2001, which, under the leadership of Osama bin Laden, were carried out by Al Qaeda, one of the most seasoned groups of the mujahideen.

After several political episodes that followed since then, with the departure of Western troops in August 2021, the Taliban came to power in Kabul. Part of the population that resists their designs has been seeking shelter in other parts of the planet, including Brazil, which already has around five thousand refugees.

"Afghanistan - rugs of peace and war" is the new project by the Oscar Niemeyer Museum (MON), which is on display in the Eye Tower (first floor and second floor). The exhibition was curated by collector Victor Nosek, with the collaboration of professor and diplomat Fausto Godoy.

The exhibition brings together 37 rugs from Afghanistan depicting scenes of peace and war and reflecting different moments in the country's socio-political and cultural landscape. The exhibition also features 19 pieces of Afghan jewelry that are part of the daily life of the people from the regions where the rugs were made.

Afghan tribal war rugs are part of the "art as a portrait of war" tradition. 

They are a dramatic update of this tradition. They represented the Russo-Afghan war and have been produced by various semi-nomadic pastoral tribes, whose way of life remained unchanged for centuries. 

Weaved in the highlands when the snow melted, where Afghans had gone in search of pastures for their flocks, and in their permanent homes during the winter. 

The "living" carpets are the fruit of this way of life. 

The high-quality wool was dyed with natural dyes collected during the annual migration. Weavers, in the silence of their tents, free from interference, used simple horizontal looms fixed to the ground. The traditional themes, developed from memory, without prior drawing, are characteristic of each artist. Preferably created for their own use, the surplus is sold and the proceeds used to buy carnelian jewelry, stones used to ward off the evil eye. 

At first in timid appearances within the traditional themes, tanks, helicopters, jets and grenades soon occupied the entire composition. Tribal and contemporary, the war rugs in this exhibition belong to the first ten years of that war, between 1970-1980, when pastoral nomadism was still possible. The advent of endemic famine and the annihilation of the herds made nomadism and the resulting production of quality "living" carpets impossible! 

May this exhibition contribute to reflection and humanity finally achieve the peace and progress it is destined for! 

Victor Nosek 
Collection and Curatorship 

dec. 1980
Handwoven rug made on horizontal looms using sheep and camel wool dyed with natural pigments. Mane and tail hair from horses are used for the side cords
129 x 92 cm

dec. 1960/70
Handwoven rug made on horizontal looms using sheep and camel wool dyed with natural pigments. Mane and tail hair from horses are used for the side cords
210 x 109 cm

déc. 1980
Handwoven rug made on horizontal looms using sheep and camel wool dyed with natural pigments. Mane and tail hair from horses are used for the side cords
143 x 98 cm

dec. 1980
Handwoven rug made on horizontal looms using sheep and camel wool dyed with natural pigments. Mane and tail hair from horses are used for the side cords
152 x 92 cm

dec. 1960/70
Handwoven rug made on horizontal looms using sheep and camel wool dyed with natural pigments. Mane and tail hair from horses are used for the side cords
194 x 102 cm

"Afghanistan - rugs of peace and war" is the new project at the Oscar Niemeyer Museum (MON). The exhibition can be seen from October 24 at the Eye Tower (first floor and second floor). The exhibition was curated by collector Victor Nosek, with the collaboration of professor and diplomat Fausto Godoy.

The exhibition brings together 37 rugs from Afghanistan depicting scenes of peace and war and reflecting different moments in the country's socio-political and cultural landscape. The exhibition will also feature 19 pieces of Afghan jewelry that are part of the daily life of the people in the regions where the rugs were made.

"Today, a museum is not just a place for preservation, but a space for dialog and reflection. The Oscar Niemeyer Museum exemplifies this role with a collection that ranges from art to historical and anthropological items, expanding the physical barriers of what a museum space is," says Luciana Casagrande Pereira, Paraná's Secretary of State for Culture. 

"Our aim is also to broaden cultural references. In this way, MON highlights the richness of Asian and African cultures, which make up one of the largest specialized collections in the Americas, presented both in long-term exhibitions and in itinerant exhibitions throughout Paraná," says the secretary.

MON director Juliana Vosnika says that the exhibition is an opportunity for visitors to see the ancient tradition of Afghan tapestry up close. "It's worth remembering that MON has the largest collection of Asian art in Latin America, following the donation of thousands of works years ago by diplomat and professor Fausto Godoy, which marked a new curatorial vocation," he says. 

Space was then made in the collection for Asian, African and Latin American art, in line with the great museums of the world, making it distinct from the Eurocentric tendency that dominates Western culture. This initiative has positioned the Oscar Niemeyer Museum among the great international museums. 

"In this vein, we are now bringing to our audience the ancient tradition of Afghan tapestry, which in recent decades has incorporated war themes into its traditional designs," says Juliana. Both themes are presented in this new exhibition, divided into two axes: peace and war.

Fausto Godoy, who served as Brazil's ambassador to Afghanistan for around two years, talks about the political importance of the exhibition, and curator Victor Nosek explains that the rugs that reflect the theme of peace are the oldest, and represent pastoral scenes, nature in general or geometric shapes. 

Tribal and contemporary, the war rugs reflect the period between 1970-1980 and will be exhibited separately on the second floor of the Tower. "We need to look at them, perceive that aesthetic and reflect on how it is possible to create beauty in war," says Godoy.

He points out that Afghanistan is one of the most politically sensitive regions on the planet. "Nestled between giants as diverse as Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran and China, its geographical location not only places it at the crossroads of great civilizations, but also of some of the most important religions on the planet: Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, in particular," he says.

The collector and curator of the exhibition explains that Afghan tribal war rugs are part of the tradition: art as a portrait of war. "They are a dramatic update of this tradition," says Nosek. 

According to him, these pieces represent the early years of the Russo-Afghan war and were produced by different semi-nomadic pastoral tribes, whose way of life remained unchanged for centuries. "May this exhibition contribute to reflection and humanity finally achieve the peace and progress to which it is destined," says the curator.

Afghanistan - rugs of peace and war

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Find out more about this exhibition on the Google Arts & Culture platform.

More than celebrating the centenary of this artist from Curitiba, who is one of the main names in the arts in the State and the Country, the exhibition “Trilhos e Traços – Poty 100 anos” (“Tracks and Traces – Poty 100 years”), held by the Oscar Niemeyer Museum (MON), becomes a reference point for Poty Lazzarotto.

From now on, visitors to MON, especially the hundreds of students from public and private schools who visit the Museum daily, will certainly be able to find out more and get to know this brilliant artist better.

It is also an opportunity for the viewer to delve into Poty's life and work. This immersion in such vast content, gathered here, increases the repertoire, instigating a new perspective about the artist.

Recently, the Museum added the largest collection ever donated to the institution to its collection: approximately 4 thousand works of art signed by him. An excerpt of this can now be seen in this exhibition. Thus, the central axis of this building becomes the stage for the largest collections received by MON, alongside Asian and African art exhibitions.

The donation of Poty's work, generously made by the artist's family, brought to the Museum, in 2022, more than 3 thousand drawings and 366 engravings, in addition to tapestries, carvings, silkscreens, and sculptures. These are works that further enrich MON's collection, which in recent years has increased fivefold in size, consolidating the Museum as one of the most important in Latin America. 

Being the institution that preserves Poty's legacy is a source of pride, joy, and responsibility. In this exhibition, we share some of these feelings, translated by the artist's unmistakable traits. Belonging here has a full name: Poty Lazzarotto.

Juliana Vellozo Almeida Vosnika 
Director-President of the Oscar Niemeyer Museum

"A alma se expressa com mais claridade através do rosto [The soul expresses itself most clearly through the face] (Simmel)." We find this depth in Poty's portraits. They are expressive and agitated images: they have an actual existence, and there is no room for impersonality. Icons that surprise natural and social reality, ranging from realism to caricature. They are precise strokes and economic lines that synthesize the subject's personality in small details. The macambúzio (sullen) Bakun contrasts with the artist's energetic self-portraits. Poty, looking at himself, reveals the individuality of a firm and direct man, given to few daydreams - and human, all too human.

Born in a modest wooden house in Capanema, raised on the railroad tracks that passed in front of his home, with a father who was a railroad worker, a mother who was a cook, and a grandfather who was a carpenter, Poty developed a passion for humble workers that he cherished throughout his life, even after living in metropolises such as Rio de Janeiro and Paris. His drawings and engravings reflect his passion for the working man, both the day-to-day hard worker, especially the railway worker, the "polaca's" carts, the street vendors, the drivers of the open streetcars and the pub owners, and the simple man in everyday life: at church parties, workers' societies, the Cine Morgenau, the game of truco, all celebrating life. Poty sees work much more as fulfillment than hardship and alienation. In this poetic work, we find St. Francis's energy, Goya's courageous strokes, and Käthe Kollwitz's tenderness. Delicacy and social character, dignity, and humanity.

Poty celebrates the indigenous wisdom of nature and myths. Amid the countless languages and rich rituals, he gathers the born artist in the basketry, the stools, the bows and arrows, the body painting, the masks, and even the superficial knots and the architecture of the huts. Poty's Upper Xingu drawings in the still extensive Amazon Rainforest of the 1960s (1967/68) are a eulogy to nature, to Rousseau's good savage. They do justice to the overflowing intellectual and intuitive imagination of the locals.

"O mundo profano é o universo das interdições, enquanto o mundo sagrado corresponde ao das transgressões [The profane world is the universe of interdictions, while the sacred world corresponds to that of transgressions] (Bataille)." Poty's saints are well known, especially St. Francis, whom he has drawn, carved, and engraved countless times. The traces of the sacred, the communication with the metaphysical present in Poty's soul, lead him to a religion in the sense of religar, from the Latin religare, which celebrates human understanding. So, you don't necessarily have to be linked to a religion praising the gods to be religious. The aura, if there is one, is the one that involves connecting with others, the practice of humanism. Inspired by Saint Francis, Poty celebrates nature and the human person.

Immersing yourself in Poty's drawings and engravings means traveling through the daily life of provincial Curitiba. From the scenes of the "polacas'" carts, workers going to the trade by bicycle, disasters on the railroad, fights in the bars, the floods in the city center, the children flying kites, the Queirolo Brothers' Circus, and Didi Caillet's glorious return, to the procession of children running after Father Maurício's trolley, which handed out candies to attract the little ones to the Holy Office. He also extended his gaze to other places: his strokes slipped through the maritime scenes of Bahia, the churches and saints of Ouro Preto, and the sculptures of Chartres and Paris cathedrals. An eternal traveler, Poty combines nostalgic Curitiba with the discovery of the world.

Since the beginning of his artistic activity, Poty has always been a narrator, creating images to tell stories. As a child, he made comic strips inspired by American models; as a teenager, he created images of violence and fantasy inspired by authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and William Shakespeare. The cinema, also a form of narration through images, was another decisive influence on his work: as a child, he used to go to the old cinema at the Morgenau Club and then draw the scenes that stuck in his memory. Poty became a book illustrator at a young age: from 1943 until the end of his life, he illustrated more than 170 titles by Brazilian and foreign authors. With his love of cinema, he also produced a masterful series of drawings in the style of classic movie posters - drawing as an extension of the seventh art.

"Na galeria dos nossos grandes (mas muito poucos) ilustradores de nossos livros (numerosos, mas ainda muito poucos), nunca a fusão verbo-ícone atinge tão intrínseca adequação: nunca um ilustrador, entre nós, foi tão ilustrador, tão capaz de dizer o que as palavras não sabiam ou não podiam. [In the gallery of our great (but very few) illustrators of our books (numerous, but still very few), never has the verb-icon fusion reached such an intrinsic adequacy: never has an illustrator, among us, been so illustrative, so capable of saying what words did not know or could not.]" (Antônio Houaiss)

Poty's first public mural was in Praça 19 de Dezembro, on the occasion of the Centenary of the Emancipation of Paraná, in 1953, in a more realistic style. Since then, he has created many public works, which are present in several Brazilian cities, and has also reached Europe, with works in the Algarve, Portugal, and Paris. Public murals were an extension of engraving for the artist due to their ability to bring his art to a broader audience. In his public work, Poty uses sophisticated techniques to assemble and articulate symbolic elements to represent human history, the development of cities, the arts, knowledge, and technology. For those who visit Curitiba, we invite you to find Poty's murals in the city: like the rain and the pine trees, they are part of the Curitiba landscape.

"Cabe a cada menino guardar, para todo o sempre, um instante daquele voo de silêncio e fúria, de ruído e paz... [It is up to each child to keep, forever and ever, an instant of that flight of silence and fury, of noise and peace...]" (Valêncio Xavier)

The exhibition “Trilhos e Traços – Poty 100 anos” (“Tracks and Traces – Poty 100 years”), held by the Oscar Niemeyer Museum (MON), has approximately 500 works, a sample of the donation of 4 thousand works made by the artist’s family to the Museum, in 2022. Curated by Maria José Justino and Fabricio Vaz Nunes, it celebrates the centenary of Poty Lazzarotto (1924-1998).

In the exhibition, the works were organized around nine thematic groups present in Poty's artistic career, representing his different facets: the Narrator, the Work, the Xingu, the Sacred, the War, the Daily Life, the Traveler, the Muralist, and the Portraitist.

Poty, an artist from Curitiba? No: Poty, artist of the world. The premise of this exhibition is to show one of Curitiba's most essential artists in his universal dimension. We are celebrating the centenary of Poty Lazzarotto's birth by bringing to the public a wide selection of his works, which were recently donated to MON by Mr. Lazzarotto. João Geraldo Lazzarotto, the artist's brother. In this exhibition, the pieces have been organized around nine thematic nuclei present in his work, representative of the different facets of the artist: o Narrador (the Narrator), o Trabalho (the Work), the Xingu, o Sagrado (the Sacred), a Guerra (the War), o Cotidiano (Everyday Life), o Viajante (the Traveller), o Muralista (the Muralist) and o Retratista (the Portraitist). But Poty, the "piá" (kid) from Capanema who loved movies and comic books, is even more than all that. Through drawing, his primary means of expression, he approached the most varied themes, passing through different styles, always seeking to take art to its most important destination: the people. In his constant and obstinate artistic activity, he showed the real world of work and social reality; he recreated, in images, the creative universe of literature; in his murals, he shaped the great adventure of universal history. Always seeking to make art popular, he went from engraving to illustration, from tiny drawings to monumental murals. In the simplicity of his drawing, with his human and poignant vision of the human experience in all its dimensions, Poty created a vast collective imaginary: in his trails and strokes, we travel the world.

A exposição “Trilhos e Traços – Poty 100 anos”, realizada pelo Museu Oscar Niemeyer (MON), reúne aproximadamente 500 obras, um recorte da doação de 4 mil peças realizada pela família do artista ao Museu, em 2022. Com curadoria de Maria José Justino e Fabricio Vaz Nunes, comemora o centenário de Poty Lazzarotto (1924-1998).

MON holds a grand exhibition celebrating the hundred years of Poty Lazzarotto

The Oscar Niemeyer Museum (MON) is holding the grand exhibition “Trilhos e Traços – Poty 100 anos” (“Tracks and Traces – Poty 100 years”), to celebrate the centenary of Poty Lazzarotto (1924-1998). Curated by Maria José Justino and Fabricio Vaz Nunes, the exhibition brings together approximately 500 works, a portion of the donation of 4,000 pieces made by the artist's family to the Museum, in 2022. The opening will be on April 11th, at 7 pm, in Room 6.

"Poty, in its centenary, remains current, incomparable, and this new exhibition reinforces the importance of the artist to the cultural identity of Paraná. I am sure that the exhibition at the Oscar Niemeyer Museum will introduce his unique work to thousands of people and also to new generations", says Luciana Casagrande Pereira, Secretary of State for Culture of Paraná.

“More than celebrating the centenary of this artist from Curitiba, who is one of the main names in the arts in the State and the Country, the exhibition becomes a place of reference for Poty Lazzarotto”, says the director-president of MON, Juliana Vosnika.

“From now on, visitors to MON, especially the hundreds of students from public and private schools who visit the Museum every day, will certainly be able to learn more and get to know this genius of the arts better”, she comments.

The exhibition is also an opportunity for viewers to delve deeper into Poty’s life and work. “By providing an immersion in such vast content, gathered here, MON encourages the public to expand their repertoire by taking a new look at this unique artist”, says Juliana.

The premise of the exhibition, according to the curators, is to extrapolate regional borders and present Poty in its universal dimension. “In his ceaseless and obstinate artistic activity, he recreated, in images, the creative universe of literature; in his murals, he created the great adventure of universal history”, they inform. “Always seeking popular dissemination of art, he went from engraving to illustration, from tiny drawings to monumental murals.”

In the exhibition, the works were organized around nine thematic groups present in Poty's artistic career, representing his different facets: the Narrator, the Work, the Xingu, the Sacred, the War, the Daily Life, the Traveler, the Muralist, and the Portraitist. “But Poty, the boy from Capanema who loved cinema and comic books, is even more than all of that,” say the curators.

On March 29, Curitiba's birthday – and coincidentally, Poty Lazzarotto's birth date – MON received the largest collection ever donated to the institution: approximately 4.5 thousand works. The year was 2022. This collection has more than 3,000 drawings and 366 engravings, as well as tapestries, carvings, screen prints, and sculptures, among others. The donation was made directly by João Lazzarotto, brother of the artist.

These are works that further enrich MON's collection, which in recent years has increased fivefold in size, consolidating the Museum as one of the most important in Latin America.

A selection of Poty's vast collection can be seen in this exhibition. Thus, the central axis of the Museum building becomes the stage for the largest collections received by MON, alongside displays of Asian and African art.

Poty Lazzarotto (Curitiba, 1924-1998) followed his path through drawing, then delving deeper into engraving, of which he became a master, being the creator of the first engraving course at the São Paulo Museum of Art (Masp). Much of his production is biographical, ranging from boyhood memories around railway tracks and train carriages to records of Curitiba types and the settings they inhabit.

 Poty is direct and straightforward in his drawings and engravings. It was with this spontaneous characteristic that he illustrated various works of Brazilian literature, such as Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands), by Euclides da Cunha, and Grande Sertão: Veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands), by Guimarães Rosa. He could also not have failed to give life to the controversial people from Curitiba portrayed in the stories of another icon from Paraná, Dalton Trevisan. 

 As if his presence in literature were not enough, Poty left his mark throughout Curitiba through his monuments or tile and exposed concrete panels, a practice that began with the panel “Desenvolvimento Histórico do Paraná” (Historical development of Paraná), in 1953, at 19 de Outubro Square. Other examples of this production are the panels on Nestor de Castro Street, in which he shows, on one side, a scene from a Curitiba that no longer exists, and, on the other, the evolution of the city, which emerged amid pine forests, inhabited by immigrants, and which stands out in the field of urbanism.

 The collection donated to the Oscar Niemeyer Museum relates to this entire production. In it we can find originals so often reproduced in books and other publications about the artist, we come into contact with the drawings he made on his expedition to the Xingu, in 1967, and we enter the intimacy of an almost unknown Poty. Furthermore, we still find sketches, projects, and studies, and we can see the evolution of the trait, from its youth to maturity. Therefore, the collection constitutes true ethnographic material about this artist. 

 Donated to MON by Poty Lazzarotto's family, the collection also includes, of course, consummate works, drawings, woodcuts, lithographs, metal engravings, wood carvings, and concrete blocks: thousands of pieces that give clear testimony to the versatility of this artist. Through Poty, we learned about the art that was made and is being made in Paraná.

 Preserving not only the legacy of this artist, but his memory, is above all a duty – a task assumed and adequately carried out, now, by the Oscar Niemeyer Museum.

A exposição “Trilhos e Traços – Poty 100 anos”, realizada pelo Museu Oscar Niemeyer (MON), reúne aproximadamente 500 obras, um recorte da doação de 4 mil peças realizada pela família do artista ao Museu, em 2022. Com curadoria de Maria José Justino e Fabricio Vaz Nunes, comemora o centenário de Poty Lazzarotto (1924-1998).

Na mostra, as obras foram organizadas em torno de nove núcleos temáticos presentes na trajetória artística de Poty, representativos das suas diferentes facetas: o Narrador, o Trabalho, o Xingu, o Sagrado, a Guerra, o Cotidiano, o Viajante, o Muralista e o Retratista.  

Trilhos e Traços – Poty 100 anos

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The sensitivity of French artist Eva Jospin is evident in the Oscar Niemeyer Museum's new project: the exhibition "Re-Selvagem". By approaching nature and time in poetic works of art, she evokes our emotional memory.

In a fast-paced world, the face-to-face space of museums is the perfect balance to our digital saturation. The physical encounter with art makes people recognize themselves and their history through the works. This is and should always be one of the roles of the museum: to awaken deep feelings from our unconscious. 

In the case of MON’s Eye privileged exhibition space, this encounter is enhanced. Far beyond a conventional white exhibition room with four walls, this is a unique place. 

Just as people have the power to adapt, the Eye changes in creative and unusual ways with each new exhibition. And this one, signed by Eva Jospin, is probably one of the most surprising that has ever been here.

Her work puts the viewer inside it, gives it new meaning and awakens curiosity. In a provocative and intelligent contrast, it speaks of the impermanence of matter and the permanence of art. By creating giant installations out of apparently fragile raw materials such as silk and cardboard, the artist makes us think. 

What seems disposable becomes a lasting work of art. 

In this way, Eva Jospin addresses our relationship with nature and, consequently, with our essence. The visitor's gaze will be challenged all the time to notice something more. And the visitor will certainly notice.

Juliana Vellozo Almeida Vosnika
CEO of the Oscar Niemeyer Museum

The exhibition "Re-Selvagem", by French artist Eva Jospin, presents a kind of reinvented jungle in the Eye and Araucaria Space of the Oscar Niemeyer Museum (MON). Curated by Marcello Dantas, the new international exhibition brings together nine large-scale works, including installations and drawings, as well as two videos. The raw materials for the installations are silk embroidery, cardboard, wood, bronze, fabric and other materials. The artist transforms these everyday raw materials and creates a living landscape.

Eva Jospin is renowned for her meticulous, handcrafted creations that evoke imagined worlds—silent architectures and lush natural landscapes—brought to life through the patient, almost obsessive act of restoring a sense of origin to original material.

Using something as ordinary as corrugated cardboard—a mass-produced, industrial material made from forest cellulose—Jospin creates entire jungles. In ReSelvagem, this alchemy becomes even more intense: layers of cardboard are intricately cut and stacked to form trunks, roots, and branches, composing a dense, labyrinthine forest. Each sculpture feels like an excavation into the memory of the medium—where the mundane is transformed into the sublime and everyday scraps become living landscapes.

For Jospin, the forest is more than a representation of nature. It’s a symbolic space, a place where mystery, transformation, and the unexpected reside. Like in ancient tales, her forests are territories where we lose ourselves to find ourselves again. In ReSelvagem, visitors move through winding paths of paper and shadow, stepping into sculpted realms of foliage and form—a quiet, intimate ritual of immersion. These shapes awaken forgotten memories, stir the collective unconscious, and summon a deep, contemplative silence.

The contemplative dimension of her work is also explored in Chambre de Soie (Silk Room)—one of the artist’s major works, consisting of an artwork embroidered with over 400 shades of silk, cotton, and jute threads, produced by artisans from the Chanakya Atelier and the Chanakya School of Craft in Mumbai, India. Inspired by the tapestries adorning the halls of Rome’s Palazzo Colonna and Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own, the installation spans over 350 square meters of landscapes based on Jospin’s own drawings. First unveiled during Dior’s haute couture show, Chambre de Soie reimagines the grand panoramas of the 19th century, drawing viewers into a quiet meditation on the rhythm of handcrafted gestures. The threads and figures compose an intricate garden, almost as detailed as the manicured landscapes of Versailles; however, they are made of time and memory.

This experience, situated between natural forest and crafted embroidery, the artificial and the natural, the physical material and intangible symbol is the result of a unique visual language Jospin has refined over the years. Her work has been featured in some of the world’s most prominent institutions: including the Palais de Tokyo, the Musée du Louvre, Villa Medici, Palazzo Fortuny in Venice, and the Orangerie at Versailles. Her art doesn’t command attention through scale, rather it draws intensity from the silence of contemplation.

ReSelvagem is a call to return—the material to the forest, the craft to the hand, and the gaze to the imagination. Jospin reminds us that even what’s been tamed, cut, and transformed can, through art, recover its power and vitality—and lead us back to the vast mystery we carry within.

Re-Selvagem will be occupying the Eye of the Oscar Niemeyer Museum in Curitiba, as well as the second floor of Casa Bradesco at Cidade Matarazzo in São Paulo. The exhibition arrives in Brazil as part of the France-Brazil Cultural Season and serves as a prelude to Eva Jospin’s forthcoming monumental installation at the Grand Palais in Paris, scheduled for late 2025.

Wood, cardboard, brass, fabric and various materials, 177 x 335 x 290 cm

MON holds new international exhibition at the Eye

"Re-Selvagem", by French artist Eva Jospin, is the next international exhibition at the Oscar Niemeyer Museum (MON). The exhibition will open on june 5th, at MON’s Eye and Espaço Araucária. Marcello Dantas is the curator.

The exhibition will feature nine large-scale works, including installations and drawings, as well as two videos. The raw material for the installations is silk embroidery and cardboard, but the artist also uses wood, bronze, fabric and other materials.

"Eva Jospin's arrival at the Oscar Niemeyer Museum reinforces our mission to connect Paraná's public with the most relevant contemporary art in the world," says the Secretary of State for Culture, Luciana Casagrande Pereira. "This exhibition also reaffirms the cultural diplomacy guidelines that Paraná has established with France, in a particularly significant year, marked by the celebrations of the Year of Brazil in France and France in Brazil."

MON director Juliana Vosnika says that the sensitivity of French artist Eva Jospin is evident in this exhibition. "By approaching nature and time in poetic works of art, she evokes our emotional memory," she says.

Juliana comments that the physical encounter with art makes people recognize themselves and their history through the works. "In a fast-paced world, the face-to-face space of museums is the perfect balance for our digital saturation," he says. "This is and should always be one of the roles of the museum: to awaken deep feelings from our unconscious." 

Curator Marcello Dantas says that Eva Jospin is known for her meticulous work of creating, with her own hands, illusions of an imaginary world - silent architectures and abundant natural spaces, which are born from the patient and obsessive gesture of restoring a sense of origin to matter.

"For Jospin, the forest is more than a representation of nature. It's a symbolic place where mystery, the unexpected and transformation take place," says Dantas. "As in ancient tales, its forests are territories where we lose ourselves in order to find ourselves again." In "Re-Selvagem", the visitor crosses trails of paper and shadow, enters universes of sculpted foliage, experiencing a kind of intimate rite. The shapes evoke forgotten memories, awaken images from the collective unconscious, provoke silence.

Eva Jospin was born in Paris (1975), where she graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. For the last fifteen years, she has been creating meticulous forests and architectural landscapes, which he explores through various media. Drawn in ink or embroidered, sculpted in cardboard or bronze, her works evoke Italian baroque gardens, 18th century rocaille decorations and artificial caves. She was resident at the Villa Medici in Rome in 2017 and elected to the Sculpture section of the Academy of Fine Arts in 2024.

Her international exhibitions include: Inside at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2014); Sous-Bois at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara (2018); Eva Jospin - Wald(t)räume at the Museum Pfalzgalerie in Kaiserslautern (2019); Among the trees at Hayward Gallery in London (2020); Paper Tales at Het Noordbrabants Museum in Den Bosch (2021); Galleria at Musée de la Chasse et Nature in Paris (2021); Panorama at Fondation Thalie in Brussels (2023); and Palazzo at Palais des Papes in Avignon (2023).

In 2024, she presented two new solo exhibitions: Jungle, at Museo Fortuny in Venice, during the 60th Venice Biennale, and Eva Jospin-Versailles at the Orangerie of Château de Versailles. She has developed several large-scale installations as part of special commissions, including Panorama (2016) in the center of the Louvre's Cour Carrée and Cénotaphe (2020) in Montmajour Abbey. She also created a series of embroidered panels for the Dior Haute Couture 2021-2022 show (Chambre de Soie, 2021).

Marcello Dantas is a renowned Brazilian curator, artistic director and producer, recognized for his interdisciplinary approach integrating art, technology and immersive sensory experiences. Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1968, Dantas has a diverse academic background: he studied International Relations and Diplomacy in Brasilia, Art History and Film Theory in Florence, and graduated in Film and Television from New York University, where he also did postgraduate studies in Interactive Telecommunications.   

Throughout his career, Marcello Dantas has been responsible for the design and artistic direction of various museums and pavilions, both in Brazil and abroad. He is also known for curating high-impact exhibitions that attract large audiences and specialized critics. Among them "Ai Weiwei: Raiz", by Chinese artist Ai WeiWei, and "Invisível e Indizível", by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa, both at the Oscar Niemeyer Museum.

Re-selvagem - Eva Jospin

MON holds an exhibition of African art with pieces recently incorporated into its collection

The exhibition "Africa, Artistic Expressions of a Continent", held by the Oscar Niemeyer Museum, presented by Copel and made possible by the government of the State of Paraná, can be seen by the public from August 31 in Room 4. It is a selection of the significant donation made by the Ivani and Jorge Yunes Collection (CIJY) to the MON.

There are approximately 1,700 works from one of the most significant collections of African art objects from the 20th century, which now belong to the Oscar Niemeyer Museum collection and, consequently, to the State of Paraná.

Africa, Artistic Expressions of a Continent

“Turn a tree into firewood and it will burn; but it will never give you flowers and fruit again.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), Bengali poet

The ancient metaphor of fertility related to the vital force and potency of trees, with their deep roots, their stem as a foundation, their ramifications as unfoldings of themselves, their legacy as symbolic flowers and fruits, was never more adequate as to be applied to the permanent links with our Mother Africa. If we then think of the metaphors of the gigantic baobab tree, from the more severe historical references associated with slavery by the so-called “tree of oblivion” to the milder ones, such as the famous tree in the book The Little Prince, the lessons arising therefrom would be analogous: “You become eternally responsible for what you captivate”, as Saint-Exupéry said.

If artistic expressions arise from the senses, the legacy of civilizations arises from the hands; and how beautiful are the manifestations of peoples, how beautiful are the arts of Africa! The love and yearning for the beautiful, the love and fear of nature and the gods and the fearless appreciation of civilization were so dear to African nations that they indistinctly distributed and reputed all aspects of existence, contradictory or not, some form of artistic expression.

The arts demarcate the forms of a time. The long-term exhibition “Africa, Artistic Expressions of a Continent” thus presents one of the essential points of the transition in the development of older African arts, since their withdrawal from the continent and the subsequent decontextualization of their intrinsic meanings, seen in the modern and contemporary world from an emphasis on their artistic forms. Previously restricted to European museums as objects of so-called traditional millenary cultures, today the works bequeathed from Africa have been able to conform to today's artistic work, offering the so-called “traditional contemporary African art” to the whole world, as it is known by specialists. These works are instruments of recent and authentic modernization of African popular arts or even modern reproductions of ancient pieces destined mainly for emerging markets in the tropics.

Strengthening institutional ties, the Oscar Niemeyer Museum (MON) received this important donation of African works from the Ivani and Jorge Yunes Collection (CIJY). Over more than fifty years, the couple has acquired works that span five continents. This donation includes around 1700 objects from Africa: masks, statuettes, busts, miniatures, everyday objects, musical instruments and a large number of other pieces. In a positive way, they are now part of the Oscar Niemeyer Museum collection, which we congratulate for having taken this opportune step, enriching its collection and, at the same time, the entire African legacy in Paraná and Brazil. We invite everyone to take an active part in this immersion in African art, observing its forms in what they themselves may surprise and allow an equivalent enjoyment to others in the artistic universe, without watertight determinations, taking this dialogue a step further. 

From the great tree of Africa, multiple fruits and new legacies were generated. It was no coincidence that, like most sub-Saharan peoples, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, the Mayans, the Incas, the Aztecs and basically all the great civilizations developed a culture of wearing masks and made representations in sculpture . With the exhibition of objects from such different cultural heritages, we find here an important point in common: within the museum, these arts are elevated to the same artistic platform, equaling African art to the level of world art. Here is a way to honor the visual ancestry of the past and to open up the new plantings, routes and perspectives of this art in the future.

Renato Araújo da Silva
Curator and Specialist in African Art

The exhibition “Africa, Artistic Expressions of a Continent”, held by the Oscar Niemeyer Museum, presented by Copel, can be seen by the public from August 26th, in Room 4. It is an excerpt from the great donation made by the Ivani and Jorge Collection Yunes (CIJY) to MON.

"The arrival of the African art collection is part of a consolidation process of MON's frame of reference. It establishes as a differential of the institution to primarily collect Brazilian and Paraná art and expand its non-Eurocentric look to Latin American, Asian and African art," explains Juliana Vosnika, director-president of MON. "We are constantly seeking to increase the collection because that is the soul of a museum, its essence," she says.

Juliana recalls that, in 2018, MON was the museum chosen for its technical conditions, management capacity, and credibility to receive a donation of almost 3,000 works of Asian art. Donated by diplomat and professor Fausto Godoy and coming from several countries of that continent, part of the works can be seen by MON visitors in the exhibition "Asia: the Earth, the Men, the Gods" in Room 5.

The largest art museum in Latin America inbuilt area, with 35,000 square meters, MON has tripled its collection in recent years. Since it opened in 2002 and until 2015, MON had about 3,000 works of art. Today, it has more than 9,300 works in its collection.

According to the curator of the exhibition "Africa, Artistic Expressions of a Continent," Renato Araújo da Silva, the works donated to MON were acquired over more than 50 years by the couple Ivani and Jorge Yunes, owners of one of the largest art collections in Brazil.

"With the exhibition of objects from such distinct cultural heritages, we find here an important common point: within the Museum, these arts are elevated to the same artistic platform, equaling African art to the level of world art," he says. "Here is a way to honor the visual ancestry of the past and to open the new plantings, routes, and perspectives of this art in the future," comments Renato.

The exhibition includes masks, sculptures, bronze busts and heads, metal miniatures, everyday objects, and musical instruments.

The works come from countries like the Ivory Coast, Mali, Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Mozambique, among others.

Renato Araújo da Silva is a historian in Philosophy from the University of São Paulo and coauthor, among other published works, of the book "Africa in Arts." Curator and researcher, he has worked at the Afro Museum and held other exhibitions in museums, such as the Sacred Art Museum of São Paulo.

"Africa, Artistic Expressions of a Continent”
Room 4

folder-africa-en.pdf

ÁFRICA - EXPRESSÕES ARTÍSTICAS DE UM CONTINENTE

The exhibition “Africa, Artistic Expressions of a Continent” is a part of the donation of approximately 1,700 pieces of contemporary African art, from the partnership between MON and the Ivani and Jorge Yunes Collection. Watch a message from the exhibition's curator, Renato Araújo, and visit Room 4 at MON. Exhibition presented by COPEL@copel_energia. #ArteAfricana#MuseuOscarNiemeyer

África, Artistic Expressions of a Continent at MON!

África, Expressões Artísticas de um Continente no MON!

África, Expressões Artísticas de Um Continente. O nascer de um novo legado para a arte, para você.  ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀  Em cartaz na Sala 4 do Museu Oscar Niemeyer.  ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀  Exposição apresentada pela COPEL @copel_energia. #MuseuOscarNiemeyer#ÁfricaNoMON

#emcartaz | África, Expressões Artísticas de Um Continente

#emcartaz | África, Expressões Artísticas de Um Continente

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Miguel Bakun saw the world in a unique way. A native of Paraná of Slavic descent, he lived in the Curitiba of the last century. Considered one of the most significant artists due to his national and international presence, he was nicknamed the Brazilian Van Gogh not only because of the similarity of his lines and colors, but also due to the personal characteristics he shared, such as shyness and introspection.

Bakun's works, which are part of the Oscar Niemeyer Museum's collection, are of incalculable artistic and historical value. In this exhibition, part of them can be seen in an interesting dialog with dozens of drawings and paintings by him, many unpublished to the general public, which belong to Walter Gonçalves' private collection.

An exhibition that gives even more visibility to the impeccable production of one of the most original representatives of modern Brazilian art. For 30 years, Bakun recorded the simple in a sophisticated manner. He turned scenes of the sea, vegetation, flowers or simple everyday places, such as backyards, into magnificent images. With magnificent strokes, he also produced several portraits. 

As well as being shown in this solo exhibition, this set has also been transformed into a book about the artist, with texts on his pictorial and graphic production by Adolfo Montejo Navas and Ronaldo Brito. 

Misunderstood in his time, Bakun is increasingly acclaimed by critics and spectators alike. He is an artist who evokes a deep sense of pride and belonging in us, the people of Paraná.

Bakun was not just a self-taught, isolated or semi-savage artist, but a self who sought the truth of nature (the truth in nature).

It's a conception and a modus operandi that brings to mind another imaginary, not only visual but also cognitive, because the nature-landscape and the iconographic references it handles (backyards, fences, ponds, shores) are not at all delimited or secure as such, they metamorphose. It could be said that Bakun provides a blind spot that disrupts the traditional observation of things, and which can be better observed in the 21st century, when even facts fight with the imagination for control of the status of the real.

What fate would be assigned to the reading of Bakun's work, when the orbit of his ouevre is guided so much by pictorial emotion, feeding the vision? Besides, the degree of inner life or inner power in his divided nature even seems to evoke a “supernaturality” as a vital feeling, also aesthetic.

In them there is a shapeless matter of pictorial masses, like paintings in combustion, throbbing, pulsating the images they offer, because, deep down, there is a certain telluric magma, palpitating, brought to the surface. Paintings that are always vibrant, not stationary, exciting.

A pictorial microphysics in which the traces are evident, numerous, solitary traces standing out from the general tonal whole, harmonized in its evident weave, but participating in a harsh, abrupt, rough devotion.

Miguel Bakun seems to have reached his maturity as an artist with a painting that is still being made before our eyes, that hasn't been completely finished. To this day, it presents an instability, an oblique, more tangential gaze.

Miguel Bakun's voracious paint impregnates the canvas and turns it into a vehicle for the artist's expressive Self. In turn, the agitated strokes of his graphite and charcoal, irradiating through the paper, mobilize the scenes and transform them into authentic existential flagrants. Unpretentious, casual, it is precisely their dispersed and elusive character that ensures their aesthetic consistency. The sketches may even begin as preparatory studies for a future oil painting, but they soon emancipate themselves as autonomous events. And if, as studies, they reveal a certain mastery of the academic foreshortening (churches and ships prove it), it's clear that, for Bakun, the world is above all an uncertain and palpitating place: hence the almost random scribbles, kinds of commas and semicircles, more or less arabesques, I would say, that cross the scene like a gale. And nothing escapes it, there is no neutral space for this artist who lives his being-in-the-world as an incessant perceptual struggle.

But he treats his territory in a free and anti-academic way, not at all mimetic, in constant mutation, faithful to his instinctive and uncultivated expressionism. It is a modest nature, averse to the grandiose, that attracts his exacerbated sensitivity. And even then, he goes to look for it behind its back, in anonymous parts of the world, which he chooses as totems of his passage through life. 

More than a decade ago, I think, Miguel Bakun's work stopped being a local phenomenon in Paraná and became an intrinsic part of Brazil's rarefied visual modernism. It took its place among his peers, mainly Pancetti and Guignard, painters who, in an indifferent, if not hostile, environment, were opening the way for a modern post-impressionist visibility in Brazil.

"Miguel Bakun: O Olhar de uma Coleção" is the Oscar Niemeyer Museum's new project. The exhibition, curated by Eliane Prolik, will open on March 20th in Room 11. 

Bakun's works, which are part of the Oscar Niemeyer Museum's collection, can be seen in an interesting dialog with dozens of drawings and paintings, many of which have never been seen by the general public, which belong to Walter Gonçalves' private collection. In total, the exhibition brings together around 60 paintings and drawings.

A collection and the work of Miguel Bakun

The understanding and the habitat of the oeuvre of Miguel Bakun (1909-1963) are the objectives of this exhibition, which originates from a corresponding book publication, organised from the private collection of Walter Gonçalves and the dedication of Eliane Prolik.

In his painting and drawing, Bakun expresses the peculiarities of a curious and gentle perception of the world in relation to nature, while at the same time demonstrating a creative potency through the impetuous and ritmous brushstrokes or graphisms that are present in the fature of his works. A strong and expressive subject who captures the world in his art with so much listening and openness, capable of constructing an oeuvre of poetic power and very rich visual thinking.

His recent recognition, in Brazil and internationally, is the result of our new researches, critical readings, publications, exhibitions and the presence of Bakun's work in art fairs and public art collections. After his emergence in a wider cultural sphere, and especially in Brazilian modernism, it seems to us necessary to revisit his work, here in Curitiba, the place where he produced it, mostly in the 1940s and 1950s. We need to know more about him, his place in our context and about ourselves. We have a text by Adolfo Montejo Navas on Bakun's paintings and, for the first time, the artist's graphic work receives a specific critical approach by Ronaldo Brito.

This exhibition presents 25 paintings and 24 drawings by Bakun, together with 5 paintings from the collection of the Museum Oscar Niemeyer. It is important for private collections to be shown to the public and to participate in making art more visible and meaningful.

Eliane Prolik - Curator 
Walter Gonçalves - Collector

Oil on canvas
47 x 54 cm
(PMB/WG – Painting 004)

Oil on canvas
45 x 55 cm
(PMB/WG – Painting 006)

Oil on canvas 
47 x 33 cm
(PMB/WG – Painting 021)

Oil on canvas
55 x 45 cm
(PMB/WG – Painting 002)

“Miguel Bakun: The View of a Collection” is the latest project by the Oscar Niemeyer Museum. The exhibition, curated by Eliane Prolik, will open on March 20, in Room 11.
Works by Bakun that are part of the Oscar Niemeyer Museum’s collection can be seen in an interesting dialogue with dozens of drawings and paintings, many of which have never been seen before by the general public, which belong to Walter Gonçalves’ private collection. In total, the exhibition brings together approximately 60 paintings and drawings.

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