“Angel”

Wood, marble, bones, metal, fabric, ropes, acrylic, paper, wax: all of these materials have been submitted to the hands of the artist Angelo Venosa, mainly in the form of sculptures. The artist has public sculptures installed at the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, and at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, on Leme beach. His work is also present in the collections of important museums such as MAM – Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Niterói, among others. He participated in the Venice Biennale in 1993; the São Paulo Biennale in 1987; and the Mercosul Biennale in 2005. Angelo Venosa began producing his works during the 1980s, a period that culminated in the emergence of many artists who worked with painting. However, Venosa decided to take the opposite direction of his contemporaries, increasingly approaching sculpture. He was also part of the “Ateliê da Lapa”, alongside Daniel Senise, Luiz Pizarro and João Magalhães, where he was the only one who created three-dimensional works.

Through the simultaneous use of materials that do not necessarily have a relationship with one another, this artist's work often causes uneasiness or strangeness. The oppositions between organic and inorganic, figurative and abstract also permeate his work, resulting in works that resemble body parts, fossils, or ancestral objects. Thus, the most diverse elements are manipulated by Venosa, in sculptures that are neither organic nor inorganic, that are neither figurative nor abstract.

For art critic Rodrigo Naves, “the relationship between form and nature established by Venosa is not the representation of a problem that arose in another sphere, the visual translation of issues that are external to him. Conversely, art is the place par excellence for the configuration of these types of issues – which already says a lot about his artistic project”.

He has participated in exhibitions such as the 19th São Paulo Biennial (1987), the 45th La Biennale di Venezia (1993) and the 5th Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre (2005). He currently has public sculptures installed in several locations throughout the country, such as the Rio de Janeiro Museum of Modern Art (Jardins), the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art (Ibirapuera Garden), the Pinacoteca de São Paulo (Jardim da Luz) and Copacabana Beach/Leme, Rio de Janeiro.

A major retrospective celebrating his 30-year career was held at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro (MAM Rio) in 2012, passing through the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo in 2013 and the Palácio das Artes, Belo Horizonte, and the Museu de Arte Moderna Aloisio Magalhães (MAMAM), Recife, in 2014. This exhibition was chosen among the ten best of the year by the newspaper " O Globo".