Vera Chaves Barcellos

Vera Chaves Barcellos (born 1938) is a Brazilian artist and educator.

She deals with the theme of "Body Landscape" to engage with the natural environment. Such connections between the land and the body reveal conceptual and aesthetic operations of a symbolic, cultural and ritual natue. Several other artists who have this theme like Barcellos are Delfina Bernal, Silvia Gruner and Lygia Paper.

Life

Barcellos was born in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, in 1938. She studied music and graduated in 1956 from Instituto de Belas-Artes de Porto Alegre. However, she gave up her plans to be a musician and instead, she decided to pursue the visual/fine arts. Between 1961 and 1962, Barcellos studied printmaking, painting at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and Saint Martin's School of Art in London, at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague and at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. On top of that, she studied lithography and linocut at the Academie Van Beeldende Kusten in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

On her return to Brazil, she worked on not only painting, lithography and woodcut printing. She had her first solo exhibition, in Porto Alegre, in 1963.

During the 1970s, she began to incorporate photography in her work. After receiving a scholarship in 1975, she undertook further studies on photography at the Croydon College of Art and Technology. After this experience in London, photography became the central medium for the artist. Also, reproduction got important to her questioning of the nature of images. Her series Testarte was presented at the 1976 Venice Biennale and at the 1977 São Paulo Art Biennial. In 1986, she moved to Barcelona. From 1970 to 1977, Barcellos taught engraving and painting at the Federação de Ensino Superior de Novo Hamburgo. *note*

Since the 1980s Barcellos's production has included multimedia installations, manipulated photography, computerized images, objects, videos, and animation. Beginning in the 1980s she became a Spanish citizen.

Her work has been included in group exhibitions in Latin America, Germany, Belgium, Korea, France, Holland, England, Japan, the United States, and Australia. She has also had solo exhibitions in Brazil and abroad. In 2007, Barcellos received the Prêmio Joaquim Felizardo.

With the artists Carlos Pasquetti and Patricio Farias, she launched the Obra Aberta Gallery, which operated from 1999 to 2002. In 2003, she established the Vera Chaves Barcellos Foundation which owns more than fifteen hundred works by Brazilian and other artists in Porto Alegre, dedicated to the preservation and promotion of contemporary art. In 2007, the Centro Cultural Santander in Porto Alege presented a retrospective of her work.

In 2015 she participated in the international collective exhibition A Mão Negativa, with curator Bernardo de Souza, in Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro.

She currently lives and works in Barcelona and Viamão.

Installations

“L’Intervallo Perduto ou Homenagem a Gillo Dorfles”, 1977-1995. (L’ Intervallo perduto, or homage to Gillo Dorfles)

This work returns to a series of slides dated from 1977. It portrays a group of twenty eight images of mouths taken from a TV screen. The images have as complement a small TV covered with a white veil where we can see the word SILENCE.

“Memorial III - Dones de la Vida”, 1992.(Memorial III - Women of one’s Life)

This is a large scale installation about memory and the female universe; using an original photo of a field of flowers and more than one hundred names of women the work evokes the feminine world of the viewer’s personal memory. This is done, through the use of “flowerbeds”, backlight boxes, showing photographic manipulated images , as well names engraved in marble plates or written on cheap cardboard or even printed on pages kept in small boxes that can only be touched while wearing white gloves

“Enigmas”, 1996 (Enigmas)

This installation leads with the cultural evolution of man. Three suggestive photographs of primates, point to three important factors of man’s evolution: the hand, the eye and thought. An archaic alphabet made of salt, in little illuminated boxes, placed on the floor suggests the development of the abstraction capabilities. Little pieces of mink, cut from an entire piece, mounted on small canvases, are symbols of cruelty, a constant factor in human history, but also it’s annulment. An image of cosmos, taken by the telescope Hubbe, represents the expanded eye. A grotesque and ironic figure of the primate bride poses the question: does the marriage animal-culture succeed?

Cegueses - O Caminho de Tiresias ou Reflexões sobre a Cegueira”, 1997 (Blindness: the Tiresias’ way or reflexions on blindness)

This is the only installation that Barcellos didn’t use images. It was a project for an “in situ” installation for a collective show held in the Museu d’Art de Girona, in the north of Catalunya, where she used only texts. These described the main works of five Brazilian artists, ( Lygia Clark, Helio Oiticica, Cildo Meireles, Antonio Dias and Waltercio Caldas); in the sixties and seventies they worked with different non visual matters. The texts printed on blue backlight panels closed the 36 windows of the “Mirador”, in the old museum’s top floor, from where usually one can see beautiful all around views of the medieval quarters of the city. Also, some books with the texts in braille were displayed on tables for blind visitors.

"Per Gli Ucelli", 2010

The installation for Octógono, in a certain way, is divided into three parts: two of them are in the platform-the ancient craftsmanship of manipulating glasses, and the post-modern technology of light circuits mechatronic commands.

And hovering over this, the “natural” sound of birds. Although a manipulation was elaborated using overlapping tracks with different birds singing, nature is still the origin of the sounds. In a certain way, there is a dialogue between the created object and nature.

Recent Works

One of the recent work is Enigmas (2015) Centro Municipal de Arte, Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. According to Barcellos, this exhibition could also be classified as a installation which is made of images , fossils, skin pieces and salt boxes. There is a documentary about this exhibition " Enigmas "[1] by Vera Chaves Barcellos, and it was showed from March 7 to May 23, 2015 in Centro Municipal de Arte Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil.

Exhibitions

She has received lots of accolades during her career, such as at the 20th Salao de Gravuras de Belo Horizonte (1965) and 4th Salao de Artes Visuals in Porto Alegre (1977). Also, one of her shows called O grao da imagem was honored as best solo exhibition by Porto Alegre's secretary of culture in 2008..

Selected Solo Exhibitions

Vera Chaves Barcellos, Instituto Cultural Brasileiro, Norte-americano, Porto Alegre, Brazil (1963)

Vera Chaves Barcellos, Museu de arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (1984)

Vera Chaves Barcellos, Le revers de reveur, San Roc Chapel, Valls, Spain (2003)

Vera Chaves Barcellos, O grao da imagem: Uma viagme pela Poetica de vera Chaves Barcellos, Santander Cultural, Porto Aegre, Brazil (2007)

Vera Chaves Barcellos, Imagens em migracao: Uma exposicao de vera Chaves, Barcellos, Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo (2009)