Caetano de Almeida

CAETANO DE ALMEIDA April 15 – May 15, 2011 | 11 Rivington St, NY

Eleven Rivington is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Brazilian artist Caetano de Almeida, on view from April 15 – May 15, 2011.  De Almeida has exhibited widely in Latin America and Europe for two decades, and this exhibition will mark his second solo exhibition in the United States.  The show will feature recent large-scale paintings, as well as works on paper in the gallery office.

Caetano de Almeida has been creating optically-charged, patterned abstract paintings for the last 12 years. At first glance, de Almeida's canvases are prismatic, highly controlled arenas of chromatic synergy; examined inches away, the viewer encounters a surface encrusted with evidence of the artist's hand: dimpled strokes, pooled paint, torn remnants of tape, vectors produced via controlled drips of fluid acrylic. Following the traditions of Brazilian Modernism and Tropicalia (Antropofagia), de Almeida culls freely from the paradigms of American and European abstraction and renders something distinctly Brazilian: networks of lines evoke Sao Paulo's highway glut, interwoven grids tuned with the birght palette of a Bahia tourist bag. A painting's ostensibly mechanistic systematizing belies its true identity as purely handmade object: each picture is intuitively conceived from scratch with the rudimentary materials of pencil, tape and acrylic paint.

Caetano de Almeida was born 1964 in Campinas, Brazil and currently lives and works in Sao Paulo. Recent solo museum exhibitions include Borda at Pinacoteca do Estado de Sao Paulo, Brazil, whic traveled to the Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro in 2007. Individual gallery exhibitions include Galeria Luisa Strina, Sao Paulo (6 solo exhibitions since 1990); Distrito Cu4tro, Madrid, Spain (2007); and Anna Niemeyer, Rio de Janeiro (2007). His work is in the collections of Museu de Arte Moderna de Sao Paulo; Muse de Arte Contemporanea USP, Sao Paulo; Instituto Inhotim, Minas Gerais; and the Museu de Arte Moderna de Rio de Janeiro.