Frans Krajcberg: Nature
October 17 – December 14, 2008
Museu de Arte Moderna
de São Paulo
Curated by the artist
Frans Krajcberg: Nature makes a powerful appeal for environmental conservation, evoking the Negro River Manifesto
Approximately 65 sculptures and 40 photographs by the father of ecological art in Brazil warn of illegal fires in the Amazon
Together with the exhibition MAM 60, the São Paulo Museu de Arte Moderna will also stage Frans Krajcberg: Nature in the Oca building, free of charge. In the exhibition, Brazil’s pioneer of ecological art revisits the premises put forward in the Negro River Manifesto among approximately 65 sculptures and 40 photographs made and chosen by him. Krajcberg is the artist to whom homage is being paid in MAM-SP’s 60th birthday celebrations.
In the Manifesto, signed together with Pierre Restany and Sepp Baendereck in 1978, the conceptual foundations are laid for a new environmental and existential awareness, called naturalism. The idea is that art, like human beings’ environmental vision, be stripped of ambitions for power in any area in which it is found (social, political, religious), in order to find a new, sharp sensibility, free of judgment and directly related to the clarity and readiness of perception.
Humankind should open its sensibility to the sovereign role of nature as a structure that encompasses everything, including the human domain, wherein it becomes free to interact both with the environment and with other people in a direct, benevolent way. Social structure and daily worries of a material or « scientific » order, that is, realism (as it is described in the Manifesto), cease to be necessary in order for people to feel a new environmental awareness, which is not just a concern with the production of pollutants and self-sustainability, but a new way of interacting with the world and others.
In this scenario, nature acts as a catalyst for the purification of the senses and thought, in all its force and magnitude. Contact with virgin forest (in the case of the Manifesto, written in the upper Negro River, en route to the Amazon Forest) enables people to tap into the vital energy inherent to the world and everything in it, which cleanses the senses.
These concepts are translated by the works in the exhibition, whether in photographs that simultaneously decry fires illegally lit to burn off parts of the forest and suggest nature’s endless capacity for regeneration, or in sculptures of varying dimensions, often colossal (the tallest in the exhibition stands 6 meters high), made from harmonious combinations of organic materials, extracting beauty without supplanting their pre-existing natural forms. Some of the works have never been shown before.
Museu de Arte Moderna
de São Paulo
OCA building
Av. Pedro Álvares Cabral, no #, Gate 3
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