Galeria Leme presents the fourth solo exhibition by Marcia de Moraes in its space. Entitled “Story of the Eye”, the show presents the artist’s most recent production through an unprecedented series of drawings, collages and ceramic sculptures.
The exhibition space is occupied by a large installation consisting of 15 meters of continuous drawings made with graphite and colored pencils. This set is correlated to 4 collages in which the artist explores the juxtaposition of two-dimensional planes of drawing, creating complex compositions of traces and vivid colors. This three-dimensional exploration culminates in the first-hand presentation of 9 ceramic sculptures, in which the imaginative vocabulary that Marcia de Moraes has been developing over the last ten years in her drawings and collages is further explored, such as: tongues, teeth, eggs, umbilical cords, cylindrical and circular structures, bones, stems, tails, among others.
The title of the exhibition references the book “Story of the Eye” written by the French author Georges Bataille in 1928. The story narrates the intense and exotic sexual adventures of a young couple, describing in detail their desires and endeavors involving other partners. Such intensity causes one of the characters to suffer a syncope and become completely mad. But the works featured in the exhibition were not made as illustrations of the book. According to the artist, the relation of these works with the book became evident from the results she obtained with the clay and the enamels used in the sculptures. Their forms exude eroticism and viscerality, they look like pieces of flesh full of recesses and penetrations. The glazed finish of the pieces gives them even more organicity, because, at first sight, they seem to be wet.
In spite of their various formalizations, there is a great coherence between Marcia de Moraes’ works in their studies of the relation between the empty and full spaces of the compositions, as well as in the encounter between intense colors with fluid and gestural forms. This common thread makes her work affiliated, however indirectly, to the legacy of the Brazilian abstract avant-gardes, which have in color and in the suggestion of movement, two of its foundations. Her large-scale drawings, intricate collages and visceral sculptures, are manifestations of different spatial rhythms that express psychic cadences to the images. By looking at the set of works within the exhibition space, one has the feeling that the shapes and colors have stepped out of the sheets of paper and now belong to the three-dimensional world, or vice versa. Thus, the exhibition invites the audience to create their stories with their own eyes.
About the artist:
Marcia de Moraes. São Carlos, Brazil, 1981. Lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil.
Among her solo shows: O Sopro, Centro de Arte Contemporânea W, Ribeirão Preto, Brazil (2018); Os fósseis ou as laranjas, Marcia de Moraes, Oswald de Andrade Cultural Workshop, São Paulo, Brazil (2016); Atos Falhos, Galeria Leme, São Paulo, Brazil (2015); Elaine Arruda and Marcia de Moraes: Cheio de Vazio, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, Brazil (2014), among others.
Group shows such as: Intercâmbios/ Tempos Cruzados, SESC Quitandinha, Petrópolis, Brazil; Acervo MARP- Aquisições Recentes. MARP 25 Years, Museum of Art of Ribeirão Preto, Brazil (2018); Library of Love, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, USA; Kogan Gallery Exhibition La Carpe Diem Collection, Kogan Gallery, Paris, France (2017), among others. In 2011 she won the Funarte Prize for Contemporary Art, São Paulo, and in 2016 the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, New York, USA.
Her work integrates public collections such as: the Permanent Collection of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Brasília, Brazil; MARP – Art Museum of Ribeirão Preto, Brazil. She had a book about her work published by Cobogó in 2017.
Click here for the exhibition catalog.
