São Paulo, Brasil
19/08/2023 - 18/11/2023

“Ivald Granato was, period. An artist who was born for the arts; a painter who was born for colors and brushes. A being at the service of artistic endeavor whose freedom and experimentation were the preeminent marks of a busy transdisciplinary trajectory,” says Daniel Rangel, curator of the exhibition Seres, which will open at Dan Galeria on August 19. The exhibition brings to the public pieces from the Ivald Granato Collection, a company created by his family to conserve and disseminate his 50-year legacy of rigorous, free, experimental and uninterrupted dedication

to Brazilian art.

Granato, who died early seven years ago in July 2016, was a plural artist. Painter and one of the pioneers of performance art in Brazil, he moved between drawing, painting, sculpture, performance, video and multiple media, languages, styles, places and people. Connected to all the avant-garde movements, for Rangel, he was a pop-surrealist in the 1960s, a performative-tropicalist in the 1970s, and a rocker-expressionist in the 1980s. According to Jacob Klintowitz, a Brazilian art critic, the artist had his own language, which he called “Granatês”

.

In Seres, the curator explores this universe invented by Granato, marked by its colorful strength, expressive features, and a constant rock and roll pulse, which highlights the various beings created by the artist. In the section chosen by the curator, the figurative one covers the mid-1980s to the year 2000. “The figurative is making a comeback in full force in the world and that’s why it’s my choice. But Granato is so multiple that he could have several other cutouts: just drawings, or just abstract, or just surrealist, and many others”

, adds Rangel.

The cutout, however, marks a golden era in Granato’s work. During this period, his studio on Avenida Henrique Shaumann and Avenida Brasil was a meeting point for the most effervescent in São Paulo, bringing together the cream of artists and intellectuals. In 1987, Granato was on the cover of the magazine Veja São Paulo, which called him “The Brush Shaker”. It is also worth mentioning the success he achieved in Germany, enchanting even Princess Gloria Thurn und Taxis, who created an atelier for the artist in her castle in Regensburg, from where he developed a series of works, some of

which are present in this exhibition.

The exhibition shows how the Garnet Beings are unique while being connected to each other, the resemblance goes beyond visuality. For the curator, the figures portrayed incorporate common manners, present in the artist’s expansive personality. In it, the public will find possible multifaceted self-portraits, such as a ‘pavilion of God’, quoting the Swiss musician Walter Smetak, in addition to sketches, the artist’s notebooks, notes,

and more objects.

Regarding figurative painting, the curator explains that it has been rescued, driven by a growing identity production in which artists reproduce their surroundings. Today’s much evident “place of speech” in society, including the artistic environment, becomes necessary when it incorporates new voices, shapes, colors, and sounds, whose experience is vivid

and real.

“Since the 1960s, or even since Marcel Duchamp, ‘art and life’ have blended and surrounded contemporary production. In this sense, Granato represented what he was in fact, the avant-garde. The living space of artistic experimentation, whose time is historic, and therefore circular, which incorporates the past, revisited here, based on a current vision. The Garnet Beings are the essence of himself, and of his painting,” says the curator

.

The exhibition marks the artist’s arrival in the gallery’s collection, which according to Peter Cohn, founder of Dan, means a recovery from a historic moment in Brazilian art. “He is an integral part of this significant movement that broke all barriers after the concretists and neoconcretists,” he explains. “Granato is an icon of the avant-garde movement of the 70s.” For Peter, the artist is one of the leaders of this movement because of his blunt and irreverent stance. Ulisses Cohn, who works alongside his father at Dan Galeria, complements. “Your entry into the gallery continues the evolution of Brazilian art that we have been going through, as a traveling gallery”, he points out. “It completes the timeline and takes the place of the avant-garde, of the contestant expression, of aesthetic plurality. Renew our artistic program.”

The journalist Alice Granato, the artist’s daughter, directs the Collection and actively participates in the exhibition. She commemorates her father’s return to the art market with the representation of Dan Galeria. “It’s a joy to see my father’s work alive, pulsating and with its well-deserved place in art history,” she says. “He left a legacy of utmost importance and we worked hard, my family and I, to preserve and disseminate his work and memory.”

Visit “Ivald Granato — Seres” starting on the 19th at Dan Galeria, Rua Estados Unidos, 1638, in São Paulo. It is open Monday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., and on Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m

.