Oscar Niemeyer Museum takes art to the outside area in an unprecedented project
The unprecedented project "MON without Walls - Artists Conquer the Gardens of MON" is the newest achievement of the Oscar Niemeyer Museum and is part of the institution's 20th-anniversary celebrations. The opening will be on February 8.
Works by artists Gustavo Utrabo and Mariana Palma occupy for the first time the iconic green space next to the MON, called Parcão. The proposal and curatorship of the project are by Marc Pottier.
Inside the Museum, in the Sculpture Patio hall, the public can simultaneously see models and drawings made by Gustavo Utrabo, from Paraná (Brazil), during the conception process of his works that are outside.
"Increasingly more democratic and inclusive, with this initiative, the Oscar Niemeyer Museum breaks the physical limits of its walls and embraces the population, reaching the institution's external space and becoming accessible to all," explains MON's director-president, Juliana Vosnika.
"MON without Walls" is also an invitation for the external public, who may not have the habit of frequenting the Museum, to notice and be inspired by the art and feel instigated to visit the other exhibitions. Juliana says the project will be long lasting, with new versions planned.
For Secretary of Culture Luciana Casagrande Pereira, "MON without Walls" crowns MON's vocation of being "the place" not to be missed to visit and enjoy.
"The Oscar Niemeyer Museum today transcends this magnificent building made of concrete and glass. It is a place of encounters, exchange, and contemplation that extends to the lawns and surrounding areas. It is a privilege to offer the general public the opportunity to have contact with art in such a simple and free way," says Luciana.
Curator Marc Pottier explains that this is the first version of a project in which the MON will regularly invite artists to occupy the museum's public spaces.
He also comments, "art in public space also allows a variety of interactive activities that a museum exhibition does not always allow." According to the curator, by creating connections between the exteriors and the Museum's exhibition rooms, this new project allows showing many other forms of expression of artistic creativity.
"Semeador" (Sower) and "Ao Redor de uma Árvore" (Around a Tree), by Paraná artist-architect Gustavo Utrabo
Com este trabalho, o artista cria paredes virtuais para este novo projeto do MON, uma nova sala sem paredes onde muitos outros artistas serão convidados no futuro.
With this work, the artist creates virtual walls for this new MON project, a new room with no walls to which many other artists will be invited in the future.
The "Sower" makes a statement about life from the passage of time and emerges from a path elevated from the ground that connects the Museum to the adjacent garden. This path is constructed by repeating a floor modulation designed by Niemeyer for MON. However, instead of simply repeating the existing, the proposal aims to blur the limits between the built and the natural, producing the floor from a mixture of seeds typical of the flora of Paraná to conventional cement, sand, gravel, and water. Starting from the understanding that we are born where we walk, we learn to walk by looking at the ground.
The path leads the visitor to the work "Around a Tree", a creation of exceptional size that could be considered a new room - with no walls - on MON. It is from a tree that grows slightly inclined, seeking sunlight, that the installation is found. It is materialized as a gesture of care, in which a string of metal pieces, which support the work, surrounds the stem and brings us closer to the top. In an intrinsically ambiguous relationship, it seeks to care and be protected. The intervention wants to be light as the canopy and, in a nod of respect, looks up and around it - a movement that swings between zeal and reverence. The proposal's ascending spiral path materializes, structuring itself in a refined play of forces between balance and counterweight. The touch on the ground is done using four thin pillars, and, as Ailton Krenak says, to tread softly on the earth is what is sought.
“Transparências (Transparencies)”, by artist Mariana Palma
With a solid reference to Vanitas, a painting style produced between the 16th and 17th centuries in which compositions sought to prove the transitoriness of life, mixing symbols of transience and death; Mariana Palma's photographs explore this space of present and posthumous memory. By printing photos on voil, Mariana Palma's "Transparencies" series communicates the feeling the artist creates in her paintings. In this installation, presented in a group of trees in front of the MON's entrance, the spectator is invited to participate and see himself in the middle of the scenes produced. Beyond the juxtapositions achieved through the composition and the distance between the fabrics, the audience becomes another element of the work. The path created by and between the materials opens ways and invitations to access new perceptions and visions of a piece that blends with those who observe it and the space.
Mariana Palma creates unique pictorial spaces built by juxtaposing elements from distant families. In the large canvases of saturated colors, tiles coexist with foliage, drains with anemones, theater curtains with flowers, and printed, draped, and frayed fabrics. In watercolors and photographs, natural and artificial elements generate unlikely hybrids.
The result is unexpectedly harmonious and enigmatic compositions that, by causing a certain strangeness, invite the viewer to take time for observation. Contemplation reveals genetic clues. The grandeur, dramatic, emotional exuberance, vitality, construction of the movement, and the use of contrasting textures and luxurious materials show a dialogue with 16th and 17th-century Baroque painting, evoking reflections on sensuality, the transience of beauty, and the bombardment of images of today. Pure colors hark back to the Flemish painters, while the subtle perspectival effects suggest the mastery of the Renaissance lesson (and its subversion).
The artist uses the assumptions of the pictorial tradition to address her concerns. The references filter the emotional repertoire and generate a work in which the apparent overflow of elements follows, deep down, a precise organization.
