NYAB Event - Regina Silveira Exhibition

Regina Silveira Exhibition

Alexander Gray Associates

This event has ended.

Alexander Gray Associates presents its third exhibition with Regina Silveira. Spotlighting recent and historic works, the exhibition traces Silveira’s experimentation with a variety of graphic media investigating political themes and formal practice.

Silveira began her exploration of printmaking processes in the 1970s, and her ground-breaking portfolio, Middle Class & Co. (1971) provides the first example of the artist’s integration of photographic images into her graphic practice. The series features fifteen images of mass groupings of figures enclosed in geometric configurations; a representation of class and a standardized society much like that of Brazil, the artist’s home. In the Armadilha para Executivos (1974) drawings, Silveira incorporates images selected from newspapers of key figures in military regimes, while integrating perspectival lines in these drawings, adding complexity to the composition and highlighting her interest in space.

Silveira’s experiments with scale and perspective are widely recognized for taking form in adhesive vinyl installations,
a medium that was unavailable to her before the 1990s; In the vinyl installations, Discurso(2003) and Parra Lizarraga (2008), political domination and voice take form through photographic imagery that has been amplified through Silveira’s signature shadows, which are impossibly cast to dramatic scale. More familiar, personal and domestic subjects are transformed in other works in the exhibition, including Botão (2002–2013), an ambiguous image of a button and thread either unraveling or fastening. In the series of six photo etchings, Eclipses (2006), Silveira distorts household items, including eyeglasses, silverware, and paperclips. In these works, personal and political are up-ended, questioning perspective and location, both physically and socially.

Regina Silveira (b.1939) was born in Porto Alegre, Brazil and is currently based in São Paulo. In the 1950s she began her artistic training under the tutelage of expressionist Brazilian painter Iberê Camargo, studying lithography and woodcut, as well as painting. Renowned for her parodic explorations of space through geometric constructs, Silveiraʼs work is celebrated for both its conceptual rigor and formal impact. Silveira’s artwork was the subject of a retrospective at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil; in 2009, the Koge Museum of Art in Public Spaces, Denmark, presented a retrospective of Silveira’s public projects. The artist has exhibited throughout Europe and the Americas, including solo exhibitions at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2012); Caixa Cultural, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2012); Iberê Camargo Foundation, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2011); Centro Cultural do Banco Brasil, Brasilia (2009); Museo de Antioquia, Medelin, Colombia (2008); Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, OR (2007); Museo de Arte del Banco de la Republica, Bogota, Colombia (2007); Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, Brazil (2007); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain (2005); Art Museum of the Americas, Washington, DC (2000); Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Argentina (1998); Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA (1996); Bass Museum, Miami, FL (1992); Queens Museum of Art, New York (1992). Her work is represented in public and private collections internationally.

[Image: Regina Silveira “Middle Class & Co.” (1971) Silkscreens in 25 parts (part 8/25), 25h x 19w in.]