Antonio Dias: Nepal Papers

Galeria Nara Roesler presents Antonio Dias’ third exhibition at its São Paulo gallery, featuring a historic presentation of the Nepal papers produced between 1977 and 1986.

An expanded version of Antonio Dias’ Papéis do Nepal (Nepal Papers) exhibit, held in August and September of last year at Galeria Nara Roesler’s Rio de Janeiro branch, is set to launch at the gallery’s São Paulo venue on April 2nd, 2015, providing a new take on this artist’s multifaceted output.

The artworks featured in the exhibit were produced by Dias during a trip he took to Nepal, in 1977, to learn the craft of papermaking. The Nepalese phase is a departure from the artist’s prior work, which was markedly conceptualistic, employed then-fledgling media such as video, and created a visual lexicon encompassing pop elements, geometric planes defined by color, and words.

Systematically repeated and scrambled unto itself, that repertoire challenged the character of social convention and of the art institution as the producer of encoded, stationary meanings, validated by a system of international insertion and representativeness that the regional must submit to – that much was made evident by the English titles of the pieces, such as the famous The Illustration of Art series.