Exhibition "Maria Martins: Imagining Desire

Maria Martins: Imagining desire

Retrospective made by Casa Roberto Marinho, in collaboration with MASP,
is the most extensive research ever dedicated to the artist

Known as the "sculptress of the tropics", MM has made her mark in the history of Brazilian modernism and the international surrealist panorama.

The Casa Roberto Marinho and the Assis Chateaubriand Museum of Art of São Paulo (MASP) present the retrospective Maria Martins: imaginative desirewhich opens its season in Rio de Janeiro on 12 March. Curated by Isabella Rjeille and assistant curator Fernanda Lopes, the show brings together some 40 works (sculptures, prints, drawings and paintings) produced between the 1940s and 1950s, as well as documents, publications and photographs that contextualise the career of the artist from Minas Gerais, in Brazil and abroad.

"This is the biggest exhibition dedicated to Maria's work in Rio de Janeiro since her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1956," reveals Fernanda Lopes. "It's very interesting to show her work in 2022, the centenary year of the Week of Modern Art. She, like Goeldi and Flavio de Carvalho, represents another idea of the tropics, a darker modern which subverts what is docile and pleasing to the eye of the spectator. There is not in her work the supposedly cordial varnish of a solar Brazil".

Maria de Lourdes Martins Pereira e Souza, born in 1894, in Campanha (MG), made her mark in the history of Brazilian modern art and in the international surrealist panorama. Sculptor, designer, engraver and writer, her work was belatedly recognised in Brazil. A large part of her career was developed abroad, while she accompanied the activities of her second husband, the ambassador Carlos Martins, in various parts of the world.

Maria's libidinal poetics, which addressed issues related to eroticism and an idea of the threatening feminine, challenged the morality of the time. The artist faced petit-bourgeois rejection to her success and was even classified as obscene by specialized critics. The exhibition is named after the translation of the work Désir imaginant, whose whereabouts are unknown and about which the artist wrote, in 1948, the epigraph: "Desire must have much imagination in order to support itself".

According to Isabella Rjeille, "by placing desire as the subject of the action of imagining, Martins emphasized its creative, transformative and subversive potential. Thus, desire can be understood as a driving force that runs through all her production, attributing agency to a feeling often silenced, especially when the one who desires and expresses it is a woman".

About her work, Fernanda Lopes wrote: "Maria Martins knew that her goddesses and her monsters would always seem sensual and barbaric to most.... They dealt with 'a sexuality that was biting, invasive, that ate pieces of people' (Miguel Rio Branco). Using a term coined by the surrealist André Breton, one of his interlocutors in New York, in a text from 1928, the beauty in his sculptures was convulsive, or it would not be beauty. At that time, and for a long time afterwards, she was not what was expected of a woman, especially the 'ambassador's wife' in a conservative society. And her work, at least within Brazil, was not what one wanted to show as Brazilian art either."

It was in the 1940s, after moving to the United States, that she became better known as an artist and cultural intermediary, rapidly gaining insertion on the international circuit: "The fact that she developed much of her work abroad prevented her from actively participating in Brazilian modernist movements. However, Martins did not cease to make her unique readings and contributions regarding a certain national visuality, which ended up earning her the nickname "sculptor from the tropics", comments Rjeille.

Lauro Cavalcanti, director of the Casa Roberto Marinho, points out that Maria Martins is an artist who stands out in the Collection of the institute's patron, and recalls that her work was not always appreciated: "Restrictions were nurtured in her by the cream of the critics and by prominent painters. The former complained that his art was not clearly linked to a current, preferably geometric; while the masters of paints, in search of local tones, rejected anything not exclusively linked to national terms. The 'defects' then alleged in the sculptor's work would today be considered virtues: the singular expression of feelings, the absolutely feminine mark and the non-evidence of belonging to a specific current".

Desejo imaginante is divided into six nuclei that address how the artist articulated, throughout her production, the various imaginaries about Brazil and the tropics. The exhibition includes expanded legends for the works, offering information about the artist's trajectory and presenting new readings of her work. The exhibition closes with a complete chronology of her work, extended to the present day.

Check out the six thematic nuclei that guide the curatorship:

Impossible doubles

One of the most emblematic series of sculptures in MM's production are his different versions of The Impossible. There are at least four versions of this piece, produced between 1944 and 1946, which have elements that are repeated: they all represent pairs composed of a female and a male figure. There is, in the works assembled in this nucleus, the impossibility of fitting the forms together, of communication between opposites; however, there is also the desire for union, for meeting. The dual relationships between love and death, desire and destruction, capable of existing between the feminine and masculine are recurrent themes in Martins' work since his first sculptures inspired by Amazonian themes (such as Iacy, Cobra grande, Uirapirú).

Amazonian Imaginaries

In 1941, Maria established her studio in New York and began producing her first bronze sculptures. Some pieces were based on Amazonian mythologies of indigenous origin, ritual scenes and figures inspired by religions of African origin. The sculptures gathered in this nucleus represent human figures that merge with the nature that surrounds them, an aspect that will be worked by the artist throughout her career. The titles allude to indigenous mythologies or suggest different ritual situations. The artist's repertoire on Amazonia was composed of texts and images circulating at the time, as she never visited the region. There is, therefore, a fictional coefficient in these works: each representation carries Martins' reading and invention of these mythologies and these "tropics".

Like a Liana

Lianas, vines or climbers are characteristic plants of tropical forests, which grow on trees and compete for sunlight, water and soil nutrients. These plants are capable of enveloping larger trees and gradually dominate and kill them. In this set of works, the liana, which was once entangled over the human figures in Martins' "Amazonian" works, reappears here completely fused to their bodies or even as a formal reference for more abstract works that the artist would later develop. This metamorphosis is evident in the drawing As três Graças (1945), which suggests the transformation of a woman into a hybrid being, part human and part vegetable. This drawing precedes the sculpture Comme une liane [Like a liana] (1946), which gives its name to the nucleus and whose human figure is contorted like a vine.

For a long time I believed I dreamt I was free

The title of this section is taken from one of the artist's bronzes from 1945 - J'ai cru avoir longtemps rêvé que j'étais libre [For a long time I believed I dreamed I was free] (1945-46). Of this work, only the record remains, which can be found in the room Maria Martins: Life and Context. This bronze portrait depicts a woman whose contorted body was freeing itself from dense vegetation. Presented in 1946 at Martins' solo show at the Valentine Gallery in New York, this and other pieces were understood by critics as a gesture by the artist of having finally freed herself from the "Amazon jungle". This work is rescued here because its title brings the theme of the search for freedom, a recurring subject in several works gathered in this exhibition and texts by the artist throughout her career.

Personal mythologies

In the mid-1940s, still producing in a US context, Martins' sculptures gained greater dimensions and new formal treatments. The pieces produced from then on are given more "literary" titles and are freed from a visuality that could easily be fitted into a certain imaginary about the tropics. In a poem by the artist entitled Explication [Explanation] (1946), present in this nucleus, Maria Martins calls her sculptures "my goddesses and my monsters", thus creating her own mythologies based on hybrid, fantastic or monstrous figures.

The sixth core is an extended chronology to the present day.

SERVICE:

Maria Martins: Imagining desire

Public opening: 12 March 2022, 12 noon

Roberto Marinho House Institute

Rua Cosme Velho, 1105 - Rio de Janeiro

Tel: (21) 3298-9449

Visitation: Tuesday to Sunday, from 12h to 18h (entrance until 17h15)

(On Saturdays, Sundays and holidays, Casa Roberto Marinho opens the green area and the cafeteria from 9 a.m.)

Tickets: R$ 10 (full price) / R$ 5 (half price)

On Wednesdays, admission is free.

On Sundays, the "family ticket" costs R$10 for groups of four people.

CRM respects all gratuities provided by law

Link to tickets:

http://www.casarobertomarinho.org.br

Free parking for visitors, in front of the site, with capacity for 30 cars.

Casa Roberto Marinho is accessible for people with physical disabilities.