07.25.2008
Lecture Cycle
The lecture cycle, with national and international guests, dedicated to the Iberê Camargo – Moderno no Limite exhibition, opens a permanent programme to be organised for each exhibition at the Iberê Camargo Foundation. The objective of the lecture cycles is to broaden debate and reflection about the works of the artists on show and to create connections with matters of interest in contemporary art.
The Iberê Camargo – Moderno no Limite cycle brings together critics, theorists and art historians to discuss issues raised by the work of Iberê Camargo in the field of modern and contemporary art. The curators, Mônica Zielinsky, Paulo Sergio Duarte and Sônia Salzstein, say that one of the questions put to the speakers is the following: “Is it possible, after all, to still claim this exceptional place of expression, of protestation of subjectivity, for art?” It was also suggested that they reflect on the possibilities of painting today and subjects related to the work of Iberê Camargo.
The lecture cycle takes place from August 12-14 with three lectures per day, one at 10:30 in the morning, one at 14:30 in the afternoon, and one at 18:30 in the evening. All the lectures will take place in the Iberê Camargo Foundation auditorium, with seating for 100 people. Enrolment will be made per lecture and each person will be able to enrol for up to two. Enrolment begins on July 25 and can be done in the Foundation shop (open from 10:00 to 19:00 Tuesdays to Sundays; 10:00 to 21:00 on Thursdays; and 11:00 to19:00 on Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays). Costs per lecture are R$20.00 (students, teachers and over 60s receive a 50% discount, with documentation). Places are limited to100 per lecture.
Programme
August 12
Subject: Modern Painting
Introduced by Eduardo Veras
10:30 | Mônica Zielinsky (Brazil)
14:30 | Maria Helena Bernardes (Brazil)
18:30 | Robert Kudielka (Germany)
August the 13th
Subject: Expressionism
Introduced by Fernanda Albuquerque
10:30 | Paulo Sergio Duarte (Brazil)
14:30 | Rodrigo Naves (Brazil)
18:30 | Maria José Herrera (Argentina)
August 14
Subject: Contemporaneity
Introduced by Ana Albani de Carvalho
10:30 | Thierry de Duve (Belgium)
14:30 | Glória Ferreira (Brazil)
18:30 | Sônia Salzstein (Brazil)
The Iberê Camargo Foundation is situated at Av. Padre Cacique, 2000, Porto Alegre/RS. It is open from 10:00 to 19:00, Tuesdays to Fridays; until 21:00 on Thursdays; and from 11:00 to 19:00 on Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays. The car park and café remain open for a further one hour, except on Thursdays. Admission is free. Parking is charged according to duration of stay.
Curatorial text
The title of the inaugural exhibition and lecture cycle in the new base for the Iberê Camargo Foundation: Iberê Camargo – Modern in the Extreme, both characterises the combative and agonized temperament of the artist and also intends to describe the course of painting which eloquently responded to the great crises of the 20th century, without evasion or protraction. This, as we know, was the century of brilliance, but also of the agony of a modernity that was already more than 200 years old when Iberê became a mature artist: in short, a modernity that had led to extraordinary creative potential but also to an endless social, political, ethical and moral catastrophe. The title is both the simplest and most incisive statement that could be found to define the career of an artist for whom painting was revealed as a kind of arena which, in the path of all those crises, drew attention not just to a secular practice which in its modern acceptance had been inherited from the classical tradition of the Renaissance, but in broader terms the deep meaning of the actual practice of art.
This career, which stretched with an intense rhythm from 1941 to 1994, reveals how much, since the late 1950s, the artist found himself driven to explore paths which perhaps allowed him to rearticulate an experience, a practice for which painting was the model par excellence – a practice which the 20th century had not ceased put to the test in increasingly insistent ways just as the work started to acquire its own physiognomy. In fact, in the early 1960s his painting shattered the recently won poetics of the spool works – with those solitary objects deprived of history – and thereafter showed a vigorous gestural quality with surfaces laden with matter, not infrequently taking the painter to the edge of formlessness. The change in the work’s direction certainly resulted from the feeling that precious bodily energies were involved in the arena in which the artist had thrown himself, arduous work that would always be unfinished and futile, but which would return that aesthetic dimension of life which the route of modernity threatened to dismantle. Iberê saw art as an exceptional place where inanimate things could acquire expression, the pledge of an emancipatory experience of subjectivity.
The conference cycle for Iberê Camargo – Modern in the Extreme brings together critics, theorists and art historians from Brazil and abroad around the work of the Brazilian painter to examine the problematic and still fully ebullient legacy with which this artist marks the contemporary artistic debate. Is it possible, after all, to still claim this exceptional place of expression, of protestation of subjectivity, for art? The specialist guests for the event have been invited to approach questions such as this, which address the conditions of the possibility of painting today, questions which moreover formed the central object of Iberê’s work: the ceaseless questioning of what would remain of the expressionist vein of art in the contemporary situation, the question about whether a cognitive dimension of such a singular practice as that of painting endures; the investigation of the deadlocks into which the presupposed notions of work, action and transformation within it are led by current conditions; doubts about painting being a strong experience of memory and historicity. With painting having been a practice which for so many centuries was viewed as the paradigm for art par excellence, the questions directed to it by the artist will certainly address the actual practice of art today.
The curators
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