Perpetual Motion

An artistic trajectory of decades, which merges with experiences and inspirations collected in a continuous movement between locations and cultures, reaches the public in this unprecedented exhibition held by the Oscar Niemeyer Museum.

Artist Norma Grinberg invites the visitor to dialogue with her ongoing research, which proposes an update of language. Inspired by Concretism, Bauhaus, and Minimalism, she suggests, with her work, the contemporaneity of installations and their developments, such as interventions in architectural space, for example.

Inspired by minimalist and constructivist currents, marked by limited colors, simple geometric shapes, and universal understanding, her sculptures propose the spectator's participation. Works that occupy three-dimensional space, with the lightness and ease of a bird's flight, for example, easily involve those who observe them.

As specialist as she may be in technical processes, the artist visibly does not oppose the inevitable chance that appears in creations. By transforming raw clay into ceramic works of art, she relies on the interaction of the elements earth, water, air, and fire, which, by itself, brings the power of the imponderable.

Recognized and awarded in Brazil and abroad, it mixes in its repertoire different materials such as reinforced mortar, iron, aluminum, sand, wood, and resins, keeping ceramics as the protagonist. In common, works full of originality and contemporaneity lead the public to the perpetual movement of questioning.

MON, as a living and pulsating element, has as its mission to provide transformative experiences by exposing multiple artistic languages. By facilitating the access of its visitors to the great work of Norma Grinberg, it fulfills the important role of raising awareness through art.

Juliana Vellozo Almeida Vosnika
Chief Executive Officer | Oscar Niemeyer Museum

The closer an author approaches its own experience, the greater the chances of touching the universal. It is in the space-time of research, teaching, and creation that this encounter between observations, studies, dreams, technique, and imagination, seasoned with a certain dose of inventive daring, is processed. The atelier is the moment-place, without precise geographical or temporal definition, which concentrates the means that facilitate a range of articulated activities, resulting in a performance-object, at the service of creation.

Every exhibition is a special time in the life of the artist in which the authorial work is presented for dialogue with the public; a time to share questions, explore the paths they propose, and, much more than distributing certainties, open space for uncertainties. From the permanent dialogue, contestation, and counterpoint, new questions are born in an endless spiral, eternally in search of more knowledge, meaning, and significance. 

In the case of artist Norma Grinberg, it is a perpetual movement, orchestrated by reason and soul, in which clay is transformed by handwork, tools, chemistry, and fire, subordinated to the artist's sensitivity. In her own words:

“Since that first experience with ceramics, I have continued to make progress in my research work, discovering, in addition to its potential as a material, its applications, and significant developments in art. As an artist, I know that the foundations of 'consistent' production, both in the matter and in meaning and interpretative range, are the freedom and awareness of experimentation. This implies recording and exchanging information between those who share a language (...) I cannot and do not want to avoid the playful and rich role of investigating artistic language, scouring its meanders.”

It is this journey, which goes from the rawest and most primordial matter to the highest dreams, that you are invited to explore and discover.

Daisy Grisolia
Curator

In the popular saying from Paraíba – “The first artisan was God who, after creating the world, used the clay and made Adam”. Not by chance, the myth of the creation of humans in almost all cultures passes through mud (humus). First, the form from the dust of the earth, then the breath of life.

The history of pottery begins with the discovery of fire, a fundamental element in transforming formless and permeable clay into a resistant and insoluble material. The fire was protected in holes and those covered with clay were the first pots. The ceramic arts accompany human beings since their first steps in prehistory, standing at the interface between the production of objects for everyday use and sculptures of ritual and sacred value. Pots, goddesses, and gods have always walked side by side. 

Nothing is more intense in the ceramic arts than the path from formless to form. As much as the techniques are mastered, there is always a dose of chance and mystery when you have a piece of clay in your hands and start preparing it for modeling. Kneading repeatedly, eliminating air bubbles, and finding the exact consistency are all part of good technique and are also stages of a ritual of preparation for the first clash between creator and creature, in which the main element is the courage to create. 

These propositions are fully represented in “Bichos”, “Humanoides” and “Capselas” by Norma Grinberg. These are works that are, at the same time, a record and a recreation of her experiential universe. Fruit of countless trips through Brazil and the world, it contains impressions about the animals of the Pantanal, references to the native peoples, Gothic arches, sacred constructions, and human figures inspired by the Cycladic archetypes. Elements that, throughout her artistic trajectory, were not always linear, have been decomposing, recomposing, and transmuting into new possibilities, at the mercy of contemporary challenges. Everything changes, and everything can change...

The transformation of raw clay into ceramic elements is done by the interaction of the 4 elements: earth, water, fire, and air. For the American Indians, clay participates in a clash between forces of a celestial people against a people of the water, or subterranean world.

In Norma Grinberg's work, the connection between these primordial forces is (re)presented by alternating and overlapping elements stacked in vertical structures, like towers stuck in the earth and whose summit seeks, eternally, to touch the heavens. They are modules that break down, multiply and recompose themselves in symbolic allegories developed throughout the artist's career. The vertical works have been presented in large open spaces and constantly lead us to question the limits between sculpture and the architecture of environments.

The “Humanoides” born around 1994 has since then been transmuting in form and meaning, opening space for an endless range of narratives that go through the myths of the origin of the sociocultural diversity of humans to the contemporary questions that these same characteristics propose to us. 

The “Babel” installation explicitly addresses this issue. According to biblical narratives, wanting to reach God's powers and knowledge, humans built a huge tower of bricks (again, clay as a constituent). They were punished for their boldness with the appearance of many languages, incomprehensible to each other – it was the appearance of differences between peoples. Humans, as well as the “Humanoides” ceramic elements, are the same in terms of structure and, at the same time, so different in terms of colors, positions, influences, and interferences. Humans continue, since biblical times, always in search of an organization that allows them to learn to live together creatively, and this work leads us directly to reflection: what makes us, at the same time, so equal and so different?

“They neither know nor wonder
That dreams rule life 
And that whenever men dream
The world jumps and advances
Like a colored ball 
In the hands of a child”

(Manuel Freire)

In times so invaded by pragmatism, it is always good to remember the words of Jules Verne: “What one man can think, another man can do.”

The ceramic elements, in the visions of Norma Grinberg, occupy the three-dimensional space with the lightness and ease of the flight of birds and the dreams of all humans. Contemplating these works asks the imagination to be free to think about the unthinkable and to put the dream back in charge of creative life, whether in the field of science, art, or even the deepest spirituality.

“Voos e Flutuantes” are invitations to transcend the materiality and logic of the possible in search of what moves (even today) in the territory of dreams. They are works that re(-)invent themselves with each installation, elements born free of the perfect and defined form, playful and, for that very reason, able to challenge perception and the senses at each space-time in which they are presented. 

It is from the movement between dream and reality, between the forces of heaven and the forces of earth, mediated by clay, that creation in ceramic arts and life is made. Dreaming is not accurate (exact), but it is accurate (necessary). “Flights and Floats” has no other mission than opening portals to dreams and imagination. 

"From pure sensation to the intuition of beauty, from pleasure and pain to love and the mystical ecstasy and death — all the things that are fundamental, all the things that, to the human spirit, are most profoundly significant, can only be experienced, not expressed. The rest is always and everywhere silence. After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music." (Aldous Huxley)