Iole de Freitas: O Peso de Cada Um

Curated by Ligia Canongia, the exhibition occupies MAM Rio’s Monumental Space with a new site-specific installation by artist Iole de Freitas (b. 1945, Belo Horizonte, Brazil), composed of three large dimensions sculptures (two of which are suspended) in matte stainless steel, weighting almost four tons. The show, which celebrates the artist’s 70th birthday, also comprises works in glass with photographic print on film from the series “Escrito na Água”, from 1996/1999, from the artist’s and the museum’s collection.

With a professional trajectory of over 40 years, Iole de Freitas is now working whith steel plates instead of the polycarbonate and steel tubes structures that had been marking her production since the year 2000, when she exhibited at the Centro Municipal de Arte Helio Oiticica, at Rio de Janeiro. For the museum’s Monumental Space, she created two suspended sculptures with curved stainless steel places that are twisted and tensioned by steel lines. Each plate measures 6m x 1,5m each, and the sculptures weight about 800 kilos each. The third sculpture is placed on the space’s floor, measures 3 x 5 x 7,8 meters and weights two tons.

For this show, the artist chose to eliminate all materials that could make reference to the idea of lightness and translucency. The work is in a deep relationship with the museum’s architecture, a subject in the heart of Iole’s interests – ever since the 1990s she has been developing the research “Para que servem as paredes dos museus?” [For what are the museums walls?]. The same way she has dealt with constructions designed by architects Grandjean de Montigny (Casa França-Brasil, Rio de Janeiro), Francisco Joaquim Bethencourt da Silva (Casa Daros, Rio de Janeiro), Alvaro Siza (Fundação Iberê Camargo, Porto Alegre), or Simon Louis du Ry (Museu Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany), to create this exhibition Iole de Freitas dove in Affonso Eduardo Reidy’s project for MAM, a landmark of Brazilian modernism.

For the exhibition, the museum produced, with the support of Galeria Raquel Arnaud, a catalogue with an essay by Ligia Canongia and a presentation text by MAM’s curator Luiz Camillo Osorio.