February 9, 2021

Lourdes Grobet (Mexico City, 1940) is one of the most renowned contemporary photographers on the current art scene. Her work on Mexican wrestling has earned her wide international recognition, consolidating her view of the country’s urban culture. RocioSantaCruz brings together a careful selection of her work in the exhibition Lourdes Grobet. Lucha libre, which can be visited at the ArtsLibris bookshop, located inside the gallery, from the 6th of February. On the occasion of the publication of her photobook, Lucha libre. Retratos de familia, published by RM and available at ArtsLibris, RocioSantaCruz is preparing an extensive programme of activities and dialogues on the photographer’s work in the gallery’s courtyard.

Lourdes Grobet uses photography to undo the seams of power and censorship. Her art resorts to interdisciplinary, or rather, antidisciplinary practices: film, installation and performance come together in the visual experimentation of this photographer, whose gaze is always directed towards the blind spots of representation. Her work is a constant search for new artistic languages, as well as a defiance of any kind of formal or conceptual authority. It is not technique that sets the pace, but the affirmation of freedom.

Grobet unfolds an intuitive, as well as coherent, gaze. Hers is not a coherence born of convention, but born of the desire to show what remains hidden, set apart, relegated to the margins of society. Su trabajo sobre la lucha libre explora las raíces culturales del México urbano. Her work on wrestling explores the cultural roots of urban Mexico. For decades, she has portrayed the most emblematic characters in and out of the ring.

Grobet’s portraits stem from a childhood prohibition. Her father, a wrestling fan, refused to take her to the fights because she was a woman. Her reaction, years later, was to make enter the scene armed with a camera, and to make a place for herself. From this symbolic transgression, a strange and tender archive was gradually woven. A repository of lives, rituals and masks.

 

Lourdes Grobet’s available works

Following up on our last two issues for Paris Photo online, we present you the third and final part of our edition on the Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante (FCCB) RocioSantaCruz works actively with the family archive of numerous FCCB artist and is an international referent for the study and dissemination of Fotoclubismo. Here we introduce you to the work of Rubens Teixeira Scavone.

 

Rubens Teixeira Scavone (Itatiba, 1925 – São Paulo, 2007)

The work of Rubens Teixeira Scavone acts as a meeting point for two artistic disciplines: literature and photography. As a pioneer of science-fiction in Brazil, he was a prominent figure for the Paulist avant-garde, he won the Jabuti Prize for Fiction in 1973 and was the President of the Academia Paulista de Letras, an organisation founded in the early twentieth century with the aim of disseminating Brazilian literature, especially to young audiences. His fierce social commitment with cultural accessibility finds a precedent in his mother, writer Maria de Lourdes Teixeira, and a successor in his son, the photographer Marcio Scavone, who is recurrently photographed as a child in Teixeira Scavone’s work. Scavone junior is, additionally, a prominent figure in Brazilian contemporary photography and author of some of the most iconic celebrity portraits of our time. Amongst them, the one he took of his father.

Rubens Teixeira Scavone. O menino o robô. c. 1952

 

Teixeira Scavone’s photography unfolds within the aesthetic parameters of the FCCB and reflects a common interest in abstraction, sharp contrasts and geometric figures. His work is the result of a profound narrative investigation, based on his search for experimental rhetoric and new visual effects, which grants his compositions a literary quality. Acting as short chapters, or photo-novels, his photographs open a portal into the world of narrative, all through the eyes of a writer, and through the words of a photographer.

Marcio Scavone. Space Portrait RTS. 1969

 

His work is included in the major collection of Museu de Arte de São Paulo(MASP) and the MoMA of New York, where it’ll be part of the exhibition Fotoclubismo. Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946-1964from March to June 2021.

”La exposición Sin piel, concebida por Marina Núñez específicamente para Kubo Kutxa, presenta una selección de obras recientes que proyectan identidades maleables y empáticas con el entorno, donde los límites físicos y psicológicos se diluyen o duplican en los escenarios o paisajes de los que forman parte.

Sin piel habla de identidad, de la idea de frontera, del diálogo, casi siempre incómodo, entre lo conectado, ilimitado, abierto, blando y metamórfico, y lo constreñido, lo estereotipado y controlado. Evocaciones de un entorno en transformación y «en vías de destrucción», que hoy en día ha pasado de ser un asunto teórico a una problemática urgente, por las evidencias de catástrofe inminente, propiciadas por la crisis medioambiental.

En consonancia con las últimas ideas de la teórica Donna Haraway —que tanto influyó en el discurso artístico posthumanista de fines del siglo XX con su Manifiesto Cíborg (1984)—, la exposición invita, tal y como la pensadora propone en su último texto Seguir con el problema (2019), a reconfigurar nuestras relaciones con la Tierra y sus habitantes —humanos y no humanos—, aceptando que tenemos que habitar juntos un territorio herido. Ideas que resuenan con la obra de Núñez, donde los escenarios, si bien se presentan hostiles y distorsionados, se abren a la integración y a la simbiosis.”

Curator: Susana Blas