[open the box] Tunga

Tunga is what the name suggests, if it is possible for an artist’s name to be an onomatopoeic description of his work. “Tuuunga” seems to be a sound version of the impact of his works, which are often monumental and always come from a Brazilian tellurian force. “Tuuunga”, as a percussion, a repeating vibration, like an immense force, even if this is only felt in small objects. One magnet, many magnets that are kept inside and outside a recipient, like the crystals of the Amazon, like the shattering of contradictions that make Brazil what it is, against all probabilities. His work, in the enormous installations that use copper wires, magnets, sculptures or any elements that turn up, is an alchemy on the processes of joining, gathering and putting together what can be separated. Emerging amid this panoply of devices is a Brazilian, anthropophagic monumentality, a capacity to swallow up everything and bring everything together.

However, the tellurian expression in Tunga’s works meets the overriding influence of Joseph Beuys in a common need to make the space theatrical, to form situations that live off a powerful staging of force, which is paradoxically delicate in its precisions.

That is the attraction of his works, tautologically made metaphor in the relationship between force and power that inspired Kant in his defining of the Sublime. It is this tropical romanticism that feeds Tunga’s work.

Biography
Tunga was born in Palmares (Brazil) in 1952, and has worked with drawing, sculpture and performance. In 1974 he moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he completed the course in Architecture and Urban Development at the Universidade de Santa Úrsula, and where he currently lives and works. This was also the year when he held a solo exhibition for the first time, starting a career that has taken his works to several national and international galleries and museums, such as the Whitechapel Gallery (London, 1989), The Contemporary Art Institute of New York (1995), the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume (Paris, 2001), the Musée du Louvre (Paris, 2005) and the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Museum of Modern Art (Long Island City, 2007-2008). In 1990 he received the Prémio Brasília de Artes Plásticas and the folowing year the Mário Pedrosa Prize from the Associação Brasileira de Críticos de Arte. He is represented in several private and institutional collections, includ- ing the Museu de Arte de Brasília, Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona and The Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles).

Bibliography
Tunga: 1977-1997 (cat.), New York, Bard College – Center for Curatorial Studies, 1997.
Tunga: laminated souls (cat.), Berlin, Holzwarth Publications, 2007.