IRAN DO ESPÍRITO SANTO IN ITALY: ARCHITECTURE, LIGHT AND SCALE

Mazzoleni presents Tracing Thought. 2002–2025, a solo exhibition by Iran do Espírito Santo. The exhibition retraces over twenty years of the Brazilian artist’s career and features new site-specific works conceived specifically for the show. It unfolds in the grand rooms of the gallery’s main floor, creating an intimate dialogue with the architecture.

An internationally renowned artist with works held in major collections including MAXXI in Rome, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Espírito Santo conceived the Turin exhibition inspired by the architectural qualities of the gallery space. These characteristics allowed him to reflect on his practice over the past two decades, focusing on two key concepts at the heart of his research: light and scale.

The theme of scale is explored both semantically and physically: the scale of objects, proportion, and also chromatic scale, as in Switch (2025).  This new site-specific wall painting belongs to one of the artist’s most iconic and globally recognised series. Composed of 56 shades of grey.

Espírito Santo explains: “The wall pieces (drawings and paintings) play an important role in my production. To me, wall pieces are ‘resistance pieces’, that are there, despite our commodity-obsessed society. All this is to say that the ephemerality of it becomes part of the condition of having it done, and maybe adds another poetic layer, like an art of time as well as space.”

Iran do Espírito Santo was born in Mococa, Brazil in 1963. Often working on an ambitious scale, he wryly subverts the Minimalist tradition through his abstracted sculptures of familiar everyday objects made strange by their disorientating size and incongruous materials, such as granite, glass, steel, copper or stone. These sculptural works strip away all extraneous detail, emphasizing the essential line and form of the object. This rigorous simplicity carries through to his demanding wall drawings in paint and sgraffito that transform the entire gallery through subtle gradations of tone and hypnotic repetition of pattern but require many weeks to complete.

His works have been exhibited widely in museums and galleries worldwide, and are included in the collections of many prominent museums such as: the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, MAXXI, Rome, IMMA, Dublin and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. He has also made substantial contributions to the Venice Biennale (1999 and 2007), the Bienal de São Paulo (1987), and the Istanbul Biennial (2000).

Iran do Espírito Santo: Tracing Thought (2002-2025) will be on display until January 10, 2026, at Mazzoleni Turin, Piazza Solferino, 2, Turin (Italy).

*Cover image: Iran do Espírito Santo, Red Bulb 2, 2009. Crystal and teflon. Credits Michael Brzezinski. Courtesy Mazzoleni.