São Paulo, Brasil
30/11/2021 - 29/01/2022

In partnership with the Franz Weissmann Institute, which is curator, the exhibition “Between the Spiritual and the Material” presents the pioneering spirit of Franz Weissmann (1911 – 2005), an artist who actively involved the viewer in the work, years before the publication of the Neoconcrete Manifesto , of 1959, of which he was a signatory. The exhibition will be open for visitation from Tuesday, November 30th, at DAN Galeria, in the city of São Paulo, and at DAN Galeria Interior, a new space located in the Bandeiras Centro Empresarial complex, a development area in the city of Votorantim.

In 1951, the work Cubo Vazado, by Franz Weissmann, already had all the characteristics that a few years later would come to be celebrated as fundamental for the leap of Brazilian art towards Constructivism: autonomy of form in total distance from mimetic representation, focus on the idea mathematics that orders the composition, involvement of the spectator both sensorially and mentally. Hence the work oscillates, for those who observe it, between the sensory and the intellectual or, to use the artist’s own expression, “between the material and the spiritual”.

This satisfaction of the senses and the intellect is presented at DAN Galeria Interior in 15 sculptures that impress for their combination of monumentality and lightness, while the space at DAN Galeria in the Jardins district, in São Paulo, will house the playful diversity of 37 small colorful models , created by Weissmann between 1940 and 2003. The set was selected by the direction of the Franz Weissmann Institute from around 1000 different prototypes created by the artist, many of them never exhibited nor manufactured on a sculptural scale.

Both in the models and in the large sculptures, the activation of the empty space that marks Weissmann’s work can be seen. Between the planes and lines of the artist’s creations, you can see the shape of what was previously invisible, cutouts that transform space into geometric lace. Collecting the sensorial perception of these cutouts and handing it over to intellectual processing, the geometric formula of the cutout is guessed at, in such a way that it can be printed in space even when the metal of the sculpture is not present. That’s why Weissmann said that the best place to install his work is in memory. It is possible to transform tons of colored steel or iron rebar into a spiritual, abstract, intellectual form that, without weight, lives in the spectator’s mind.

This exhibition in two spaces also activates two times: the idea represented in the model waits perennially to be realized, or rather, neo-concreteized, as it will be inseparable from the time of the spectator who, since the “Cubo Vazado” of 1951, has become a participant.

The strength, permanence and elegance of the works in the exhibition “Between the Spiritual and the Material” mark the 50 years of the existence of DAN Galeria, 20 of which were spent in fruitful partnership with the Franz Weissmann Institute. The space DAN Galeria Interior was born activated by the magnitude of the work of the great artist of Neoconcretism.