“DELIGHT – DENY”
DELIGHT – DENY
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Date
2024 -
Technique
silk screen printing -
Dimensions
(H x W) 44.5 x 178.5 cm -
Edition
10 -
Comes with certificate of authenticity
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Since 1998, artist Ana Maria Tavares has used everyday words and expressions in various languages, incorporating language as a fundamental conceptual element in her work. This approach reveals a critical perspective on the use of mechanisms established by advertising, which has always sought to influence people and create an illusion of personal empowerment. Just as in social media or the tourism industry, the language used always aims to capture the subject, and the most perverse result of this process is the illusion of power, pleasure, and self-esteem. In Tavares's work, the words and expressions used are presented emptied of context, but their resonance opens space for reflection. The "wereable" piece, created by the artist in the form of a scarf, plays with the English words IDESIRE, IDELIGHT, and IDENY (desire, pleasure, and refusal) as a warning about how we navigate the capitalist world, where it is increasingly difficult to decide on our individual choices without the influence of the materialistic world. In recent years, the artist has been collecting familiar words and expressions, which also results in the creation of "mantras of contemporaneity." The sound obtained by repeating the chosen themes also ends up instilling in the subject a critical awareness in relation to material and spiritual reality.
Biography
Ana Maria Tavares
Ana Maria Tavares holds a Bachelor's degree in Fine Arts from FAAP (1978–1982), a Master's degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1984–1986), and a PhD from the University of São Paulo (1995–2000). She has been awarded the Guggenheim Foundation Grant (NY, 2001), the Ida Ely Rubin Artist in Residence grant at MIT (Massachusetts, 2007), and the Lynette S. Autrey Visiting Scholar grant at Rice University (Houston, 2014). A researcher and professor of art since 1982, she worked at ECA/USP between 1993 and 2017 in the undergraduate and graduate programs. In 2016, she received the São Paulo Association of Art Critics Award for Best Retrospective of the Year with her solo exhibition "In its own place: an anthology of the work of Ana Maria Tavares," presented at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo.
In his work, the understanding that tropical nature and architecture are ideological constructs at the heart of the triad of modernism, modernity, and modernization leads to the conceptualization of works that question the political, economic, and social implications of the modern movement in Brazil, exposing the complicity between the built environment and the utopias of eugenics discussed by art historian Fabiola López-Durán. Tavares's work traverses dichotomies of modernity such as progress and backwardness, beauty and ugliness, purity and contamination.
Her recent works confront industrial and artisanal techniques, incorporating ornament, an element excluded from modern architecture, to interrogate gender, race, and otherness, themes frequently absent from the celebratory narratives of modernism. Since the 1990s, her research has focused on tropical nature, whether through reinterpretations of Burle Marx (1909–1994), the Victoria Amazonica water lilies, or Brazilian river basins, in dialogue with modernist architects such as Adolf Loos (1870–1933), Le Corbusier (1887–1965), Oscar Niemeyer (1907–2012), and Lina Bo Bardi (1914–1992).
His first exhibition took place in 1982, marking the beginning of his career in Brazil and abroad. He participated in four editions of the São Paulo International Biennial (1983, 1987, 1991 and 2000), the "VII Havana Biennial" (2000), the "Pontevedra Biennial" (2000), the "Istanbul Biennial" (2001) and the "Singapore Biennial" (2006). Among his solo exhibitions in Brazil, the following stand out: "Porto Pampulha" (1997) at the MAP Museum of Art of Pampulha; "Relax'o'vision" (1998) at the MuBE Brazilian Sculpture Museum; "Enigmas de uma Noite" (2004) at the Tomie Ohtake Institute; "Tautorama" (2013) at the Paço das Artes; "Natural-Natural: Landscape and Artifice" (2013) at the Dragão do Mar Center for Art and Culture; "Modern Atlantic: Purus and Negros" (2014) at the Vale Museum; "Prisons in Two Voices: Piranesi and Ana Maria Tavares" (2015) at the Lasar Segall Museum; "Deviating Utopias with Victoria Regias" (2015) at the Galerie Stöeckle Hauser, in Stuttgart; "Forgotten Mantras" (2016), "The Untouchable Real" (2019) and "Naturalítica and Hierbabuenas" (2023) at the Silvia Cintra Gallery, in Rio de Janeiro; and "Fractured Field, SOS" (2021), a site-specific work at the Museum of Art.
