Teresinha Soares

Last updated

Teresinha Soares (born 1927) is a Brazilian pop art artist who currently lives and works in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. [1] She produced art during the 1960s and 1970s and was best known for her erotic artwork that explored femininity and pushed back against Brazil's oppressive government. [1]

Contents

Biography

Teresinha Soares was born in 1927 in Araxá, in the state of Minas Gerais. [2] Soares is still alive today and lives and works in Belo Horizonte. [1] She first began writing and acting before she pursued art as a full-time career, but she still continues to enjoy these activities. [2]

Soares was producing art while Brazil was under military rule. [2] She fought back against Brazil's dictatorship by making art that was more political and challenged the government's conservatism and strict censorship rules. [3] Her artwork was considered pop art, which depicts popular and mass culture, and Brazilian new figuration, a type of art that Soares was introduced to in either Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo. [3] Cecelia Fajardo-Hill and Andrea Giunta have stated that this is because her pieces, which were usually two-dimensional and three-dimensional, were vibrantly colored and contained bold shapes. [2]

According to Fajardo-Hill and Giunta, her artwork was also considered erotic. Traditionally, the erotic was defined as men having sexual thoughts about women. [2] Women were always the object of men's sexual feelings and desires. [2] The two have further stated that many artists like Teresinha Soares created erotic art that fought back against this sexist view of females. [2]

Unfortunately, Soares did receive criticism for her art throughout her career. Her artwork was controversial because it was erotic and dealt with topics like sexual orientation and liberation, women's rights, and Brazil's dictatorship. [3] Her art greatly upset conservative Brazilian people.

Education

Soares was educated and trained in art, as she had studied at multiple universities and enrolled in several classes to better her art skills. She began her art training in 1965 at an art university in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. [2] One year later in 1966, Soares continued her education by taking composition classes with Fayga Ostrower, who was a well-known painter. [2] While taking composition classes, she also enrolled in metal engraving classes at a university in Belo Horizonte. [2] In the same year, Soares moved to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to continue to take art classes. [2] Some of the classes she was enrolled in were taught by the Brazilian artists Ivan Serpa, Rubens Gerchman, and Anna Maria Maiolino. [2]

Artworks

A Box to Make Love In (1967)

One of Soares's popular pieces of artwork is titled A Box to Make Love In. It was one of Soares's earliest sculptures and was displayed in an exhibit titled Box Form at the Petite Galerie in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. [3] A Box to Make Love In is a wooden box painted with bright greens, reds, and yellows. [3] It has random objects attached to it like rubber tubes, a meat mincer, and a small bottle of dragon Vaseline. [3] On the top of the box, there are two faces that make the shape of a heart. [3] It also has a red fabric heart coming out of the box. [3] A Box to Make Love In is a type of art called Brazilian new objectivity. Brazilian new objectivity is the creation of new forms of art that are slightly avant-garde. [3]

She Hit on Me (BEDS) (1970)

One of Soares's well-known artworks is titled She Hit on Me (BEDS), which was installed at Municipal Park in Belo Horizonte, Brazil in 1970. [3] She Hit on Me (BEDS) is three wooden beds that are the colors of a Brazilian football team and have shutters shaped as the bodies of naked females on it. [3] On the other side of the shutters, there are brightly painted pictures of three football players named Pelé, Yustrich, and Tostão. [3] This particular piece was participatory artwork since visitors could interact with the piece by sitting on the beds. According to Sofia Gotti, She Hit on Me (BEDS) represented masculinity and femininity, but was also political because it allowed for the coming together of Brazil's national identity with the intimate, perhaps sexual, aspect of the beds. [3]

Corpo a corpo in cor-pus meus (1971)

Teresinha Soares's first big installation is titled Corpo a corpo in cor-pus meus, which translates to "body to body in colour-pus of mine." [4] This installation was based on erotic drawings Soares made a year earlier titled Eurótica. [4] Corpo a corpo in cor-pus meus consists of four blocks of white wood that are all different shapes. [4] They are all different heights and take up twenty-four square meters of space. [4] The piece is open to participation by the viewers. [4] When Corpo a corpo in cor-pus meus was first revealed to the public, there was an opening day performance at the Grand Salon of the Museu de Arte da Pampulha in 1970. [4] Teresinha Soares spoke while performers danced around and on the blocks of wood.

Xifópagas Uterinas

Another one of Teresinha Soares's artworks is titled Xifópagas Uterinas. It is a painting of what seems to be a female body. The colors Soares used are bright greens, blues, reds, and oranges. Xifópagas Uterinas can be considered pop art[ by whom? ] because of its vibrant colors.[ citation needed ]

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

Group exhibitions

Unknown date (group exhibition)

Honors and awards

Publications

Soares created Eurótica, which was an artist's book consisting of line drawings. [2] She also wrote a poem, which she read aloud at an exhibition in 1971 at the Galeria Petite in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. [3]

Bibliography

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alfons Hug</span>

Alfons Hug is a curator, critic and exhibition organizer.

Brígida Baltar was a Brazilian visual artist. Her work spanned across a wide range of mediums, including video, performance, installation, drawing, and sculpture. She was interested in capturing the ephemeral in her artwork.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hélio Oiticica</span> Brazilian visual artist (1937–1980)

Hélio Oiticica was a Brazilian visual artist, sculptor, painter, performance artist, and theorist, best known for his participation in the Neo-Concrete Movement, for his innovative use of color, and for what he later termed "environmental art", which included Parangolés and Penetrables, like the famous Tropicália. Oiticica was also a filmmaker and writer.

Roberto Cabot is a Brazilian visual artist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gretta Sarfaty</span>

Gretta Sarfaty, born Alegre Sarfaty, is also known as Gretta Grzywacz and Greta Sarfaty Marchant, also simply as Gretta. is a painter, photographer and multimedia artist who earned international acclaim in the 1970s, from her artistic works related to Body art and Feminism. Born in Greece, in 1947, she moved with her family to São Paulo in 1954, being naturalized as Brazilian.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laura Lima</span> Brazilian artist

Laura Lima is a contemporary Brazilian artist who lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. Since the 1990s, Lima has discussed in her works the matter of alive beings, among other topics. Her works can be found in the collections of institutions such as Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden; Inhotim Institute, Brumadinho, Brazil; MAM - Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo, Brazil; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Switzerland; Pinacoteca of the State of São Paulo, Brazil; Itaú Cultural, São Paulo, Brazil; Pampulha Museum of Art, Belo Horizonte, Brazil; National Museum of Fine Arts, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA; MASP - Museum of Art of São Paulo, Brazil, among others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fernanda Gomes</span> Brazilian visual artist

Fernanda Gomes is a Brazilian visual artist. She emerged as part of the generation of Rio de Janeiro-born artists that also include Beatriz Milhazes, Ernesto Neto and Adriana Varejão. With a career that began in the 1980s, her first solo exhibition took place in London in 1997.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Iole de Freitas</span> Brazilian sculptor, engraver and installation artist

Iole Antunes de Freitas is a Brazilian sculptor, engraver, and installation artist who works in the field of contemporary art. Freitas began her career in the 1970s, participating in a group of artists in Milan, Italy linked to Body art. She used photography. In the 1980s, she returned to Brazil, but abandoned the human body as mediator of her work, adopting the "sculpture body". The artist uses materials such as wire, canvas, steel, copper, stone, and water to create her works.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Franz Weissmann</span> Brazilian sculptor

Franz Josef Weissmann was a Brazilian sculptor born in Austria, emigrating to Brazil while he was eleven years old. Geometric shapes, like cubes and squares, are strongly featured in his works. He was one of the founders of the Neo-Concrete Movement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alberto da Veiga Guignard</span> Brazilian painter

Alberto da Veiga Guignard also known as Alberto Guignard or Guignard was a Brazilian painter who became renowned for his depictions of the landscapes of Minas Gerais.

Maria Lynch is a Brazilian artist.

Gisele Camargo was born on July 11, 1970, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She is a Brazilian painter and photographer who works in photography, video, and painting. She is best known for her pictorial meditations on urban and cinematic landscapes. She was formally trained at the Escola de Belas-Artes (EBA) of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro in the late 1990s. While in the institution, Camargo was part of a group of students who concentrated on issues of urban experience and visual culture in Rio de Janeiro. Camargo was different from the rest of her classmates, while they engaged mostly with multimedia language she remained a painter, with sporadic forays into photography and photocollage.

Dudi Maia Rosa is a Brazilian artist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rosângela Rennó</span> Brazilian artist (born 1962)

Rosângela Rennó Gomes is a Brazilian artist who lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. Her work consists of photographic images from public and private archives that question the nature of an image and its symbolic value. With the use of photographs, installations and objects, she appropriates and sheds new light on an anonymous body of photographs and negatives found mostly in flea markets, family albums, newspapers and archives. Rennó's interest in discarded images and habit of collecting were decisive in establishing her work strategies.

Judith Lauand was a Brazilian painter and printmaker. She is considered a pioneer of the Brazilian modernist movement that started in the 1950s, and was the only female member of the concrete art movement based in São Paulo, the Grupo Ruptura.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ivan Serpa</span>

Ivan Ferreira Serpa was a Brazilian painter, draftsman, printmaker, designer, and educator active in the concrete art movement. Much of his work was in geometric abstractionism. He founded Grupo Frente, which included fellow artists Lygia Clark, Helio Oiticica, and Franz Weissmann, among others, and was known for mentoring many artists in Brazil.

Vera Chaves Barcellos is a Brazilian artist and educator. She was featured in the Radical Women show at the Brooklyn Museum in 2018.

Valeska Soares is a Brooklyn-based Brazilian-American sculptor and installation artist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wanda Pimentel</span> Brazilian artist (1943–2019)

Wanda Pimentel was a Brazilian painter, based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her work is distinguished by "a precise, hard-edge quality encompassing geometric lines and smooth surfaces in pieces that often defy categorization as abstract or figurative. “My studio is in my bedroom,” Pimentel said in an interview. “Everything has to be very neat. .. I work alone. I think my issues are the issues of our time: the lack of perspective for people, their alienation. The saddest thing is for people to be dominated by things.”

Martha Araújo in Maceió, Brazil is a Brazilian sculpture and performance artist. She lives and works in Maceió the capital of Alagoas in Brazil. The style of her work was performance and sculpture art. She also explored her body with her performances. Her art emerged at the end of a military dictatorship that lasted from 1964 to 1985. She used their experiences during the dictatorship in her artwork to show how they felt trapped. Using textiles Araújo demonstrates the limit of the body through the play between repression and freedom. However, sculptures and performances were not her only interest she has also explored photography and video.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Gotti, Sofia (September 2015). "Teresinha Soares". Tate. Retrieved 24 April 2019.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Fajardo-Hill, Cecilia; Giunta, Andrea (2017). Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985. Prestel. pp. 49, 200–201, 231, 235, 350, 375. ISBN   978-3-7913-5680-8.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Gotti, Sofia (2015). "A Pantagruelian Pop: Teresinha Soares's 'Erotic Art of Contestation'". Tate. Retrieved 28 April 2019.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 ""Quem tem medo de Teresinha Soares?" at MASP, São Paulo •". Mousse Magazine (in Italian). 22 July 2017. Retrieved 25 May 2019.