Cathy's Art Diary

Vibrant exhibition at the Royal Academy of art from Brazil from about 1910 to 1980 known as Brazilian Modernism. The art was bright and engaging and I liked the organisation of the layout into ten artists giving space to each which also led roughly to a chronological narrative. I love early modernism and found myself drawing parallels with other art that I know well like the Bloomsbury Group. I was interested to see that many of the earlier artists trained in or came from Europe, such as Alfredo Volpi from Lucca, whereas the later ones tended to be untrained and have started in other professions like Djanira  Da Motta e Silva who had been a seamstress. There were some beautiful portraits which punctuated the show but I think my favourite work was Tarsila do Amaral’s “Farm with Seven Piglets” from 1943. A fun picture with an engaging title. I was interested to see the 1944 show of Brazilian art held at the Royal Academy featured as I had seen an excellent exhibition about i...

Interesting installation in the cloisters of Santa Maria della Visitazione by Studio Mameluca, part of Design.Ve, which uses antique palaces, galleries, closed shops and empty houses, and turns them into temporary design spaces. This work took inspiration from Brazilian face painting in the indigenous population. The work in centre of the courtyard was based on the idea of an Occa, a communal house for social interaction and created furniture based on hexagons and triangles used in the face painting This was accompanied by a photographic project to record the diversity indigenous culture in Brazil with poster sized pictures lining the cloister walls. Closed 26 June 2016