Exhibition "Samson Flexor: beyond the modern

The Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo hosts the exhibition Samson Flexor: beyond the modernstarting on January 22, 2022. Known as one of the pioneers of abstraction in Brazil, Flexor actively participated in this important movement of renewal of the visual arts in the country in the 1950s. His contribution to geometric abstraction, both in his work as an artist and as a teacher of a new generation in his Abstraction Studio in the 1950s, is widely recognised by critics. However, his later developments, characterized by lyrical or informal abstraction and a return to figuration in the last five years of his life, remain little known by the public.

According to curator Kiki Mazzucchelli, "this is the first exhibition that focuses on the development of Flexor's work from 1957, when he begins to reject static forms in paintings where gesture, opacity and transparency gradually predominate." The exhibition aims to bring to light the late work of Samson Flexor, which marks his transition from the modern to the contemporary by confronting ethical and aesthetic issues of his time.

It comprises almost one hundred works dating from 1922 to 1970. It includes well-known paintings from the artist's career, such as Baroque Abstraction n.2 (1949), which combines the geometrization of the figure and a Brazilian theme; At the Foot of the Cross (1948), a painting originally exhibited at the MAM São Paulo in 1950, which is close to total abstraction; and Diagonal Back and forth in three squares (1954), a painting from the pure abstraction phase in which he explores crossed diagonals and creates a movement accentuated by chromatic contrasts.

Curator

Kiki Mazzucchelli

 

About the artist

Samson Flexor landed in Brazil in the late 1940s when he left France after the Second World War. The painter held his first exhibition in São Paulo in 1946 and returned permanently in 1948. He also participated in the inaugural exhibition of the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo in 1949, a context in which he was invited and encouraged by the Belgian critic and director Leon Dégand to explore the paths of pure geometric abstraction. In 1951, the year the São Paulo Biennial was established, he founded the Ateliê Abstração, where he taught a new generation of artists for over a decade - among them Jacques Douchez and Norberto Nicola. Throughout his career, he held several solo exhibitions in the Museums of Modern Art in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, as well as in numerous Brazilian and foreign galleries. He participated in several editions of the São Paulo Biennial, and held a major retrospective of his work at the Musée Rath in Geneva (1965), an expanded version of which was presented at the MAM-RJ (1968). Flexor died in 1971, at the age of 64, the victim of a pulmonary enema.

 

Service

Samson Flexor: beyond the modern
Curator: Kiki Mazzucchelli
Exhibition period: January 22 through June 26, 2022
Location: Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo
Address: Parque Ibirapuera (Av. Pedro Álvares Cabral, s/nº - Gates 1 and 3)
Hours: Tuesday to Sunday, from 10am to 6pm (last entry at 5:30pm)
Telephone: (11) 5085-1300
Admission: R$25.00 full. Free of charge on Sundays. Advance booking required.