TATIANA BLASS EXHIBITS ‘REVIRAVOLTA’ AT GALERIA MILLAN – SÃO PAULO

In O fim continua [The End Goes On] (2022), a new installation the artist has created inside the gallery building cuts through the architecture and stains the space in streaks of rust.

“The encounter with Tatiana Blass’s work takes us to a place of risk, where certainty escapes us. From a broader perspective regarding the artist’s more recent work, one gets the impression that it ventures to deal with a recurring reading of and a constant reflection on time, creating materiality for a hidden element, which is present in both her paintings and her three-dimensional pieces,” writes Camila Bechelany in the text that accompanies the exhibition.

In a process similar to that of the installation, Blass has created a collection of sculptures titled Reviravolta [Twist] (2022), from hoses of rubber and iron woven together to form a Möbius strip. This amounts to an investigation into the infinite topological space that has spanned the history of art in Brazil since the second half of the 20th century. It is an allegory of the continuity of the end which does not speak of a terminus, annihilation or ending, but rather a reconfiguration of the form and the material of ways of life in space and time. Continuity and end, malleability and rigidity, form and content are contrasts dissolved and mirrored throughout the exhibition.

“Tatiana Blass’s production is marked by the constant practice of painting and by an experimentalism with the material. Whether the work is a sculpture, an object, an installation, or a video, it is always marked by the pictorial issue – which brings forward questions regarding volume, framing, and fitting –, and by the presence of the line within the composition,” Bechelany points out.

In addition to the central sculptures, the exhibition includes what Blass describes as “sculptures in action” — works made in wax containing heat-conducting elements which gradually deform the sculpted figure — and three new series of paintings: one comprising Os sentados [The Seated] (2022) and Os de pé [Those Standing] (2022), inspired by photographs of theatrical plays; the series of paintings Bagunça [Mess] (2022); as well as Pintura que derrete [Painting That Melts] (2022), made on metal with paint and wax, which is slowly undone due to a heat-conducting element activated by the presence of the viewer.

For the exhibition Galeria Millan will be releasing a brochure with previously unseen photographs and poems written by the artist over the last years. It’s a publication reverberating with Tatiana Blass’s poetic research into the fraying of visual and symbolic language, and the continuity of the end as a source of ways of living in space and time. As the artist herself suggests in an excerpt from “The End Goes On”, one of the poems in the publication, “Nothing ends, it only changes its surface.”

Tatiana Blass (b. 1979, São Paulo) lives and works in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Having attained an undergraduate degree in Art from Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP), she has been pursuing a career as professional artist working with painting, sculpture, video and installation. As from 1998, Blass has been showing regularly in art salons, studio shows, and group and solo exhibitions in Brazil and abroad. She presented her work at the 29th São Paulo International Biennial and was shortlisted at the Nam June Paik Award, in Germany. She was a recipient of the 2010 Grants & Commissions Program of the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, in Miami. In 2011, Blass was nominated for the PIPA Prize, having won the Jury Award and the Popular Vote Award for her body of works. As part of the prize, she attended an artistic residency at the Gasworks, in London. In 2014, she participated in an artistic residency in Norway, invited by 3,14 Stiftelsen Foundation.

Blass has exhibited in São Paulo, New York, Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, Miami, Köln and Rosario.