Cecilia Brunson is on a mission to introduce UK audiences to modern and contemporary Brazilian art. The Chilean-born independent curator and specialist in Latin American art is collaborating with Almeida e Dale Gallery in São Paulo on a series of three presentations at Cecilia Brunson Projects, an extension of Brunson’s home which she launched in 2014 as a commercial project space.The first exhibition in the series is a survey exhibition of works from the 1960s and 1970s by the renowned Brazilian Pop artist Claudio Tozzi whose was included in the Tate Modern’s “The World Goes Pop.” Tozzi was one of the one of the most important exponents of the Brazilian avant-garde in the 1960s and continues to live and make work in his native São Paulo.“Claudio Tozzi: New Figuration and the Rise of Pop Art 1967-1971” situates Tozzi’s critical and fundamentally political response to consumer culture as a counterpoint to the work of leading British and American Pop artists who often celebrated consumer culture, neatly encapsulating what is described as “a very particular and perhaps uniquely Latin approach to the genre of Pop Art.”To find out more about “Claudio Tozzi: New Figuration and the Rise of Pop Art 1967-1971,” which is on show until March 24, 2016, and to get an insight into the inspiration and motivation behind the series of three exhibitions spotlighting modern and contemporary Brazilian art, BLOUIN ARTINFO got in touch with Cecilia Brunson and asked her a few questions.What was the motivation and inspiration to present a series of three exhibitions of contemporary and modern Brazilian art?Since the turn of the millennium Brazilian art has been consistently represented in London with notable exhibitions including solo shows by Cildo Miereles and Helio Oiticica at Tate Modern, as well as commercial gallery shows by artists including Beatriz Milhazes, Jac Leirner, Lygia Clark, Iran do Espirito Santo, Fernanda Gomes and Tonico Lemos Auad.At Cecilia Brunson Projects we wanted to focus on a side of Brazilian modern and contemporary art that was less explored by attempting to find a critical musculature for a small group of artists and their works. Our series of curated exhibitions for 2016, Three Perspectives of Modern and Contemporary Art from Brazil, which will run from January 23rd through to December 2016, aims to provide just such an introduction.The exhibitions span from the 1940s to the late 1970s and as well as our first exhibition, which features Brazilian pop artist, Claudio Tozzi, ranges from the colourful simplicity of Alfredo Volpi who was a key figure in the Santa Helena Group in the 40s and 50s – through to Signals a curated group exhibition celebrating the experimental London gallery of the same name. During the 1970s this influential gallery introduced London to the work of leading artists associated with the Neo-Concrete movement, including Brazilian artists Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticia.The first exhibition showcases the work of the Brazilian Pop artist Claudio Tozzi. Who is Claudio Tozzi and what is the significance of his work?The late 1960s was a period of universally fragile global politics and a particularly icy phase of the Cold War. A succession of right-wing dictatorships were established in Latin America, often supported by the United States, in order to pre-empt the spread of left-wing regimes allied to the Soviets. Brazil was one of these countries and Claudio Tozzi responded politically to this tumultuous period through his art.Claudio Tozzi: New Figuration and the Rise of Pop Art 1967-1971, at Cecilia Brunson Projects will present important works, such as Guevara which was completed in 1968 in the wake of Guevara’s assassination in Bolivia during the same year, together with the provocative work Multidao (1968) which shows a discontented crowd vocally protesting against the regime. With these paintings Tozzi was risking arrest and torture by aligning his politics with the Brazilian left.The current exhibition also includes works such as Astronauts which remind the viewer of the intensity of the space race between the United States and Russia. Whilst some works seem more politically entrenched than others, they all share the same political ideology – one of survival and resistance.What links the Claudio Tozzi, Alfredo Volpi, and “Signals” exhibitions?Whilst it is an easy assumption to think that all these exhibitions should reflect a similar aesthetic and political or national sensibility, this series of exhibitions actually shows how unique, independent, complex and varied each practice is.As a curator and gallerist I try to provide a stage to articulate these different practices; each show aims at constructing an argument through the presentation and selection of the material and by highlighting the subtle but nuanced relationships between an object and the artists practice.What are the unique characteristics and features of both modern and contemporary Brazilian art that set it apart?Modern and contemporary Brazilian art sets itself apart by its relentless self-confidence and independence from the influence of Europe and North America. Familiar forms and ideas may appear but, when ingested into the Brazilian canon, are broken, reshaped or transformed in such a way as to be reinvented anew. For instance, the Neo Concrete artists reinterpreted the Constructivism of Mondrian and Max Bill into something completely their own. When Marcel Duchamp visited Buenos Aires he wrote home “Buenos Aires n’existe pas,” referring to the lack of local characteristics in a city where residents bought and copied everything from Paris.That expression would have not been written about Brazil. This is a country with a culture which has aesthetically challenged and rethought the European and North American canon since the early 1920s.
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