ALMANDRADE'S GAME: BETWEEN WORDS AND ARCHITECTURE

Since the 1970s, the artist has produced works in different media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, installation and visual poems. Throughout five decades of production, Almandrade has been interested in a practice based on the play between words and architecture. It is precisely in this framework and work structure where the artist establishes his numerous visual and literary references: from concrete poetry to comics, from constructive tradition to conceptual objects, from the intimate scale of a prototype to the political relevance of a public work.

For his first exhibition in Barcelona, Almandrade presents works developed between 1973 and 2018. Drawings that are poems and paintings that aspire to be architecture. The works suggest a flyover look, between the force of the word and the dalliance of the form in endless references to the Latin American constructive and poetic legacy, but also to the European artistic avant-garde of the 20th century. However, these “geometric meteorites of thought,” as the poet Décio Pignatari suggests, “create a signifying field, which seems to reject ‘extratextual’ instructions, even when they include some metaphorical element in memoriam Dada,” that is, there is something in the works by Almandrade that at the same time take the context of art history as a reference, doing so from a perspective outside the great artistic centers.

Almandrade currently lives and works in Salvador de Bahía, Brazil and is part of a generation that has lived between the Brazilian military dictatorship and the democratic political opening of the 80s. He began his artistic life after graduating in Architecture from the Universidade Federal da Bahía and, since then, he has participated of numerous biennials and exhibitions, including three editions of the São Paulo Biennial, Brazil; 10th Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil; 3rd Bahia Biennial, Brazil; Museu de Arte da Bahia, Salvador, Brazil; Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Mexic-Art Museum, Austin, USA; Goethe Institute, Salvador, Brazil; Centro Cultural São Paulo, among others.

This solo exhibition at Zielinsky coincides with the group exhibition “Mãos: 35 anos da Mão Afro-Brasileira” at the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, where the artist presents a series of visual poems produced in the 1970s. The exhibition, curated by Claudinei Roberto da Silva, it focuses on Afro-Brazilian production and updates the exhibition “A Mão Afro-Brasileira” that took place at the Museu Afro-Brasil in 1988.

nada, todo. Solo exhibition by Almandrade.

Until February 23, 2024.

Zielinsky. Passatge de Mercader, 10. Barcelona, Spain.