Known as Tunga, Antonio de Barros Carvalhowas born in Pernambuco in 1952 and died in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. An architect, his artistic career emerged in the 70s following the Brazilian neo-concrete artists in whom the participatory experience of art played a predominant role.
He exhibited at prominent Venice and São Paulo Biennials, at Documenta in Kassel and He was the first Latin American artist invited to do so at the Louvre Museum.
induced Bernardo Paz to conceive a collection of art produced since the end of the 60s and thus was born Inhotimthe wonderful Contemporary Art Center in Minas Gerais, in Brumadinho, 60 km away. of Belo Horizonte, with its unforgettable landscape architecture by the artist and designer Burle Marx (1909-1994), one of the main architects of Brazilian modernism.
There we saw “Lezard”lizard, (1989) an installation by Tunga made of copper and human hair, “Incest palindrome” (1990-92) in steel, copper wire that resembles hair crawling across the floor, and “True Rouge” (1997), nets, wood, blown glass, red ink, sea sponges, glass balls.
All materials used by Tunga They refer to archaic forms, they evoke the transmutation of matter. He pointed out, on one occasion, that all the material he uses is a witness since a work of art can and should be an oracle, the broader its vision, the more intense it will be.
Her works are difficult to classify, they provoke strangeness and amazement due to their great power and we remember having come into contact with her for the first time in 1987, when she presented at the São Paulo Biennial a very long hair that rose and fell between the floor and the ceiling.
Among its materials, hair is recurrent. For example, when Malba presented in 2021 “Xipóphagous”whose translation is “Siamese twins”the curator Jochen Volzcurrent Director of the San Pablo Pinacoteca, highlighted “that there are very few works in the history of art with such a capacity for synthesis, timelessness and poetic force”. It was based on a Norse legend, two twins united by their hair that caused fear in the town.
It is currently being presented in the basement rooms of the Malba “Tunga. “Me, you and the Moon”curated by Amalia Garcia and Nancy Rojas. In the press talk they pointed out that this work is a synthesis of their work in which key aspects of their creative grammar are displayed.
We return to that definition of an unclassifiable work where glass, sponges, rubber, wood, bronze, glass vessels, ceramics and the tripods on which they rest are found, becoming totemic objects.
In the documentary, which should not be ignored, Tunga explains that “Images always carry meaning, hidden formulas. “We use many different techniques, developing many different elements that come together to build a work or a set of works.”
For the artist, also very interested in archaeology, “The presence of the trunk of a fossilized tree serves as a testimony of nature before the colonizing presence of human beings. The patinated bronze sculptures that represent the thumbs evoke the living as part of the ethereal dimension of existence.”
This work was presented in France in 2015 and from 2023 to March 2024 at the Museum of Modern Art of Sao Paulo.
A 2500 kg petrified log. It occupies the center of the Malba basement room. In the commented documentary, in which he also shows his workshop overlooking the Pedra de Gávea hill, after his death in 2016 converted into the Tunga Institute, directed by his son Antonio Mourauthe artist tells the story of that trunk.
During the meeting with the press, Mourau He commented that in that million-year-old trunk there is a transformation, from vegetable to mineral.
Lisette Lagnadoborn in the Congo, has lived in Brazil since her adolescence; journalist, art critic, curator, university professor, points out that “Tunga’s work does not fit into the register of reason, in reality, it migrates to fantasy stories and as a tireless questioner of aesthetic categories, witnessing his work causes impact, amazement, in the manner of a ritual”.
(Av. Figueroa Alcorta 3415. Monday to Sunday. Closed on Tuesdays. Free entry on Wednesdays. Closing on February 17, 2025.)
Source: Ambito
I am an author and journalist who has worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade. I currently work as a news editor at a major news website, and my focus is on covering the latest trends in entertainment. I also write occasional pieces for other outlets, and have authored two books about the entertainment industry.
