“Belo Horizonte”

Marcius Galan is an artist who questions the instruments of representation and highlights their inaccuracies through his exploration. He works with sculptures, installations, photographs, collages and drawings. He graduated in Art Education from FAAP in 1997, but says that art has always had a place in his life, but the proportion has changed over the years, so much so that it has come to occupy most of his time.

In 2003, he received a 6-month residency grant at the Cité des Arts in Paris through FAAP, and the following year he spent 3 months in residency at the Art Institute of Chicago through the Iberê Camargo grant. Since then, he has not stopped producing. As the artist comments: “For me, a work only makes sense to the extent that I am learning from it.”

The beginning of his work brought questions about the functions of objects and the desire to subvert the logic of how things work. For example, tapes that the artist recorded as a teenager were linked together and their collection served, in a way, to talk about the passage of time. Marcius appropriates everyday objects in his work and displaces them, giving them new meaning. We can see this attitude in "Abstrações burocráticas" (2004), in which he gathered together various pieces of paper, such as bills and receipts, and erased their graphic content.

Another important aspect of his work is the choice of materials. The artist has used a variety of materials. The idea from which he starts and the desire to achieve it lead him to the search for the best material. In the series "Isolante" (2006-2009), the artist joins objects such as bricks and chairs together using what appears to be ordinary yellow tape, but is actually iron tape.

Mainly in his spatial works, the artist arranges objects in such a way as to test the visitor's perception, often making them doubt what they see, as he does in his work "Diagonal Section" (2008), installed at Inhotim. He creates a visual plane, but one that does not physically exist, by painting the walls around it and placing a line at the limits of what would be the diagonal glass plane. It is as if we were looking through it.

As Deyson Gilbert, Luiza Proença and Roberto Winter point out in the curatorial text for the exhibition “The Shadow of the Future” (Instituto Cervantes, São Paulo, 2009): “Within the context of visual arts, it is quite curious to note that many of Marcius Galan’s works are a challenge for the eyes. And this challenge is not due to the visual complexity of these works, but rather because, at a quick glance, they appear to be something that, upon closer inspection, they turn out not to be. But, contrary to what it may seem (again), this does not mean that these works deceive us; on the contrary, seeing them is, above all, a reminder of how necessary it is to distrust what we see in order to then try to perceive beyond vision.”

Among the artist's many solo and group exhibitions, the highlights include those held at the Centro Cultural São Paulo (São Paulo), the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, the Vancouver Biennale (Canada), the Astrup Fearnley Museet (Norway), the Frankfurt Book Fair (Germany), the “30 x Bienal” (Pavilhão Bienal de São Paulo), the 8th Mercosul Biennial (Porto Alegre), the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, the Museu do Chiado (Lisbon), the Fundação Iberê Camargo (Porto Alegre), among others. In 2009, he received the SP-Arte/Iguatemi Acquisition Prize (acquisition for the Pinacoteca do Estado), in 2011, the Cisneros Fontanals Commission Prize, and in 2012, he was the winner of the PIPA Prize, which led to an artistic residency at Gasworks.