[open the box] Carmela Gross

The Brazilian artist Carmela Gross began her career in the nineteen sixties, and her work has travelled through the last forty years of Brazilian art with a constant and striking presence in the context arising from the avant-gardes of the fifties and coming out into a new understanding of the scale and public nature of the work of art.

The work in the Colecção da Caixa Geral de Depósitos is entitled Ilha, and belongs to a series of works that deals with the outlining of spaces on walls or the floor through a drawing configured as a physical frontier between the outside and inside of a space defined as closed.

This work alludes to two ideas that run through Carmela Gross’s poetic approach: the limiting of a space – which she carries out in a literal manner, conditioning the spectator’s movement – and the idea of Utopia – in its ambivalence between an ideal and a non-existent space, as Thomas More defined it.

In Carmela Gross this Utopian place emerges in many forms throughout her work, with the word and drawing being the processes she seems to use most to do this. Drawing is a very peculiar device in the way it is used in her work, in the sense that it is often dematerialized into light or produced using three-dimensional constructions, most usually in the form of installations occupying the ground, and thus dealing directly with the spectator’s bodily presence, his movement in space, and therefore his freedom. This is what happened in the installation Em vão, presented in the Oficina Oswald Andrade in 1999, in which a labyrinth of black ribbons placed among the colonnade of an atrium conditioned the spectators’ movements.

However, the work that belongs to the Colecção da Caixa Geral de Depósitos is connected to the installation Alagados (produced later, in 2000), in which the threedimensional nature of the drawing turned into a frontier, first on the wall and then on the floor, which guides the gaze and carries out the passage between the universe of the line and the space.

One can easily understand how the relationship between the place (present in the Utopian aspect), subjective marking out of the space through drawing (which Gross has developed since her works of the seventies) and the defining of public spaces, that are modified and transformed into a different physical experience on the part of the spectator, belongs to the same universe of relationship between the public and the private, between the social space and the intimate place.

Biography
Carmela Gross (São Paulo, 1946) began her career in the sixties. She graduated in Drawing at the Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (São Paulo), and then started teaching in 1972. She has exhibited in several private and public institutions, both in Brazil and abroad, with particular attention to the shows at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo and Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, as well as at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil de São Paulo. She participated at the São Paulo biennials of 1967, 1969, 1981, 1983, 1989, 1998 and 2002, and at the Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art. Her work can be found in the holdings of the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, the Museu de Arte do Paraná, the Museu de Arte de Brasília, the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, the Fundação Padre Anchicta and the Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango de Bogotá, among others. She has public art works installed in the Brazilian cities of Santa Catarina, Porto Alegre and Curitiba, as well as in Paris.

Bibliography
Bienal Brasil século xx, São Paulo, Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 1994.
Belluzzo, Ana Maria de Moraes, e Gross, Carmela, Carmela Gross, São Paulo, Cosac Naify, 2000.