GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo presents Pop, Realisms and Politics. Brazil – Argentina, 1960s an exhibition on view 8 March–26 May 2013.
The exhibition presents and analyses the artistic production of Brazil and Argentina during the sixties, highlighting the artists’ creativity and originality, as well as the challenges they faced in a decade of profound social changes.
The exhibition title contains a reference to the artistic movements that inspired the works on show and to the topics that are examined, first of all, English and American Pop Art and French Nouveau Réalisme, as well as Situationism, the Argentine Otra Figuración movement, and the Brazilian Nova Objetividade and Tropicália movements.
In the show, the icons of American Pop Art find an answer in the personal vision of this movement proposed by South American artists who understood that freedom of expression and the ability to grasp and co-opt the mass media were essential to ensure the development of culture and their own art. The works show many similarities, starting with their subjects: mass consumerism, advertising, design, fashion, and, above all, political resistance.
This is a dynamic, powerful and unconventional art which often sparked controversy and scandal, eschewed the conventions of art disciplines, disregarding forms with the aim of engaging the viewer.
Films, paintings, installations, drawings, photographs and documents: around 140 works by important artists who shattered existing structures and embraced political commitments, creating images that have proven pivotal to twentieth-century art. These include, among others, works by Antonio Berni, Delia Cancela, Eduardo Costa, Jorge de la Vega, Antonio Dias, Rubens Gerchman, Edgardo Giménez, Carmela Gross, Roberto Jacoby, Anna Maria Maiolino, Marta Minujín, Cildo Meireles, Pablo Menicucci, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Evandro Teixeira, Claudio Tozzi.
GAMeC is the third of the four venues of the show, which was hosted – with exhibition projects conceived for each institution – at Fundación PROA in Buenos Aires and Museu Oscar Niemeyer in Curitiba in 2012. It will then be staged at MAM – Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, concluding the exhibition itinerary.
The exhibition catalogue, published by Silvana Editoriale, is the Italian version of the publication put out for the exhibition at Fundación PROA and includes texts by Paulo Herkenhoff, Rodrigo Alonso and Gonzalo Aguilar as well as historical texts by Lawrence Alloway, Waldemar Cordeiro, León Ferrari, Roberto Jacoby, Oscar Masotta, Cildo Meireles, Luis Felipe Noé, Hélio Oiticica, Pierre Restany and Jorge Romero Brest.
Curators: Paulo Herkenhoff and Rodrigo Alonso
GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna
e Contemporanea di Bergamo
Via San Tomaso, 53
24121 Bergamo, Italy
www.gamec.it