Caetano de Almeida

CAETANO DE ALMEIDA October 10 – November 15, 2009 | 11 Rivington St, NY  

Eleven Rivington is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Brazilian artist Caetano de Almeida, on view from October 10 – November 15, 2009.  De Almeida has exhibited widely in Latin America and Europe for two decades, and this exhibition will mark his New York solo gallery debut.  The show will feature five large-scale paintings in acrylic and colored pencil and one grey and white ‘pollution’ painting.  

Engaging a formal dialogue with the long and rich history of Latin American geometric and conceptual abstraction for the past 20 years, Caetano de Almeida has mined a fertile territory in abstract painting.  Remaining constant in both his past and present work is his interest in representing the flat surface of the picture plane as a loaded and optically charged visual terrain.  His paintings often engage more concrete concepts or ideas which are conveyed either by the titles of the works such as Sete Planetas (Seven Planets) or 3825 cores (3825 Colors) or through the appropriation and representation of visual elements found in de Almeida’s own history and surroundings.  Through the years, source material for de Almeida’s compositions has ranged from the colorful patterns of women’s clothing in Bahia, reproductions of iconic artworks, Wiener Werkstätte designs, to woven plastic shopping bags, and the densely intertwined highways of São Paulo’s metropolitan center.  

The new works presented at Eleven Rivington, all dated 2008-09, range from the laboriously painted to the more loosely gestural.  In these paintings, de Almeida examines the formal structure of the grid in varying guises, from a standard linear pattern of crisscrossing vertical and horizontal lines, as in Ocaso(Sunset),to a chaotic composition of curlicues and sinuous forms that appear to hover across the painterly surface as if in motion (Fenda).  Also central to de Almeida’s work has been an investigation of more experimental media such as pyrography (burn marks) and pollution on canvas.  The exhibition will include one ‘pollution’ painting, which the artist creates by exposing a masked canvas to ambient pollution.  

Caetano de Almeida was born 1964 in Campinas, Brazil and currently lives and works in São Paulo.  Recent solo museum exhibitions include Borda at Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil, which traveled to the Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro in 2007.  Individual gallery exhibitions include Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo (5 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 São Paulo; Muse de Arte Contemporanea USP, São Paulo; Instituto Inhotim, Minas Gerais; and the Museu de Arte Moderna de Rio de Janeiro.