Jack Shainman Gallery announces an exhibition of sculptural work by the late Brazilian artist, Emanoel Araújo. This will be Araújo’s first major gallery survey in New York since the 1980s, and his debut exhibition at the gallery—where his estate is now co-represented alongside Simões de Assis Galeria de Arte. As a creative, curator, and collector of Afro-Brazilian art, ephemera, and legacy, Araújo was an active mediator between the cultural, expressive, and political dynamics enmeshed in Brazilian identity. The works in this presentation—created from the 1970s through the artist’s death in 2022—reverberate with cues from his childhood in the Afro-Brazilian spiritual capital of Bahia, expeditions across his family’s ancestral Benin and Nigeria, and studies of Yoruba iconography. Explorations into the sociopolitics of geometric abstraction and preservation of Afro-Brazilian material culture further position Araújo as a prism through which historical and spiritual wisdom is filtered into a more dimensional spectrum.
In 1977, Araújo took his first major tour of Africa on the occasion of his participation in the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture in Lagos, Nigeria. Having developed an experimental printmaking practice in his twenties and thirties in a specifically Bahian context of education, community, and resources, Araújo’s time in Nigeria bestowed him with a more complex framework for his identity as expressed through his work—absorbed in an environment rich with orixás mythology, Yoruba textiles, and the endurance of these symbols and patterns as they metamorphosed via the Middle Passage slave trade between Africa and Brazil. From this point forward, his art and career were imbued with a dilating politic, a man whose association with queer, Black, and Bahian existence, and whose position as a cultural visionary, formed an expanding kaleidoscope of triangulations about the nuances of Brazilian society.
Through this conceptual evolution, the geometric forms in his early prints rose like deities into vertical dimensional sculptures—plastic structures composed from the plywood substrates used to make woodblock prints. In Paulo Herkenhoff’s catalogue on Araújo’s sculpture, he explains that the artist created an innovative vocabulary of Afro-Brazilian aesthetics, the soul of which can be found in “the body subjected to a dominating system. Colour is printed in planes that are often triangular and which articulate without superimpositions to create rectangular space. His imagination proposes the declassification of the rules of the microphysics of power in the field of expression, and the elimination of identity based on genealogy. It is in the ‘coming together of faults’ that subjectivity manages to create the discourse of art.”
In 2004—after spending ten years modernizing the Pinacoteca de São Paulo as their director—Araújo founded the Museu Afro Brasil, the nation’s first institution dedicated to promoting the history of Black artists and individuals living in Brazil from the inception of the African/Brazilian slave trade in the mid-1500s through today. At this seminal juncture in his life, Araújo forged a space where his artistic community and collection of Afro-Brazilian artifacts could be celebrated and conserved, an accomplishment after which he finally found the space to return to his practice and make the work he had been building towards for his entire life—on his own terms. In potent reds, blacks, and whites, his later Orixás and Navio series mark a completion, the geometric abstraction of his early career matured into the geometric Constructivism of his final years. Every totem echoes with the past, present, and future; each triangle illuminates a mosaic of an artist who had an immeasurable impact on the cultural transformation of his country.
Jack Shainman Gallery | 513 West 20th Street, New York
On View September 12-October 28, 2023
