León Ferrari: entre Ditaduras

León Ferrari: entre Ditaduras [Léon Ferrari: Between Dictatorships] presents a set of works donated by the artist himself to MASP in 1991. Most of the pieces was produced in São Paulo, where Ferrari (1920-2013, Buenos Aires) lived in exile for 15 years – the artist had arrived in the city in 1976, after escaping Buenos Aires during the “guerra sucia” [dirty war], that devasted the country and caused irreparable damages to the artists, whose son was murdered during the period. The exhibition gathers, thus, more than 90 works that make reference to the dictorial regimens on South America and question the repressive force they held over the people, who had all of their daily life aspect controlled.

MASP collection includes a set of Xerox prints, drawings and engravings, two paintings, one sculpture and one object – most of them created in São Paulo, except for two early works, from the 1960s. The Xerox prints are the focus of the show, as they are very reveiling of the artist’s context of work of the period, both in Argentina as in Brazil. He participated in the net of postal art that appeared in the 1960s and flourished in the 70s in Latin America. In São Paulo, Ferrari was close to artists that explored the potencial of graphic art and print media mobility and large distribution in times of political and economical coertion, hence their decision of working with graphic techniques such as heliography, photocopying, microfilm, Letraset and teletext.

In some of his prints, Ferrari uses the language of technical and architetonic drawing to make a critique to the control systems used by State apparatuses to control the poppulation and regulate every aspecto of their lives. In other works, religious aspects of the Catholic chuch are criticized in their conservatism in regard to sexuality and social habits.

For the first time, reproductions of Ferrari’s work in the show and in the museum’s collection will be compiled in a catalogue created for the show, which is curated by MASP’s artistic director Adriano Pedrosa, joint-curator Julieta González and curator Tomás Toledo.