Lia Menna Barreto (Rio de Janeiro RJ 1959)
Visual artist.
From 1975 to 1978, Lia Mascarenhas Menna Barreto studies art and drawing at the Ateliê Livre da Prefeitura de Porto Alegre. In 1984 she studies painting with Luiz Paulo Baravelli (1942) and drawing with Rubens Gerchman (1942 - 2008). The following year she earns a bachelor's degree in drawing from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) and holds a solo exhibition at the Museu de Arte do Rio Grande do Sul (Margs), in Porto Alegre. In 1988, she takes part in the 10th Salão Nacional de Artes Plásticas at the Fundação Nacional de Arte (Funarte), in Rio de Janeiro, where she receives the acquisition prize. From 1993 to 1994, she lives in San Francisco, in the United States, and studies at Stanford University on a grant from the America Arts Alliance's International Fellowship in the Visual Arts program. In 1997, she shows work at the 6th Havana Biennial, the Los Angeles Biennial and the 1st Mercosul Visual Arts Biennial, in Porto Alegre, in which she takes part again in 2003, in its 4th edition.
Critical Commentary
In the early 1980s, Lia Menna Barreto makes several works in foam, used to shape solids with an organic appearance. It is also in this period that she begins to use children's toys, especially dolls, in her works. This output brings the then young artist to prominence on the national art scene and becomes her distinctive trait.
In the 1990s, she broadens her repertoire and composes works using plastic dolls, rubber animals, stuffed animals and other toys. In the early years of that decade, she also makes works covered with various fabrics, an offshoot of her foam pieces, exploring sculptural procedures through sewn forms.
In works produced in 1993 and 1994, Lia dismembers various dolls, separating, for example, heads and arms, which are sewn to plush in unusual assemblages; she makes openings in the dolls' bodies, exposing their stuffing; or she adds doll arms and legs to teddy bears, creating other, strange arrangements. With assemblages such as these, she carries out a displacement of meaning and a transformation of the habitual relationships established with objects.
An interest in simulacra - dolls, toy cars, toy animals, artificial flowers - runs through much of her output. The artist chooses these symbols of childhood and affection and, through formal operations of dismantling and reassembly, places them on another plane of representation.
From the mid-1990s, she develops works by melting plastic dolls. The artist often mixes dolls with plastic animals, flowers and leaves, which are fused by heat and fixed onto silk fabric, in works shown vertically, on the wall.
At the 4th Mercosul Biennial, in 2003, she presents the installation Fábrica [Factory], in which she reveals her process of making the works with rubber animals. In the exhibition space, with several tables, work tools and countless rubber frogs, rats, geckos, ants, spiders, snakes and other animals scattered on the floor, the public can watch how the works are made by melting the objects at home with a clothes iron.
Critiques
"It is impossible to separate the organic character of Lia's works from their materiality. One arises from the other simultaneously. The solids made four years ago resulted from a clearly sculptural process. Thick blocks of foam were roughed out and carved and, in some cases, then given a dark coloring. The foam, the structure of the works, was only flesh, without bones or skin, since it received no covering. Hence, although they alluded to no identifiable living form, they were inevitably associated with organisms.
The structural nakedness of the early solids virtually indicated an inside that did not yet exist, because the work was completed in the flesh of the material used. The works now shown reveal a maturing from the innards to the surface of the pieces, which now have skin, all being covered with various fabrics.
There is no change here in the earlier sculptural procedures, which continue to play a structural role in the pieces. The novelty lies in adopting constructive methods in making the surface of the objects. The covering of most of them results from sewing parts together, an articulation resembling the idea the constructivists established regarding the specificity of their process in relation to the tradition of sculpture: their work resulted from the articulation of parts - which departed from the traditional techniques of sculpture and brought it closer to the construction methods of modern engineering."
Fernando Cocchiarale
COCCHIARALE, Fernando. Lia Menna Barreto. Galeria: Revista de Arte, São Paulo, n. 23, p. 82, 1990.
"The artist's usual procedure is to cut the dolls into sections, allowing new and multiple assemblages, as if she worked with the creative freedom of the fable, shaping her objects according to language games that carry a parallel 'narrative', almost a linguistic joke. A good example is one of her most disconcerting works, in which she fuses a baby and its pram into a single object, pouring her corrosive action onto the pram-baby signifying pair consecrated by habit.
The condensed space, which fuses forms and creates unexpected objects, acts critically on an everyday, automatic perceptual equation, revealing its absurdity and strangeness. With the same humor, colored balls and doll parts come together in Boneca Acrobata [Acrobat Doll]. In Ordem Noturna [Nocturnal Order], Lia combines doll parts with plush bodies, resulting in deformities that recall the taste for the grotesque in circuses or even in old royal courts, where deformed dwarfs were jealously kept for general amusement. For the artist, these deformations evoke the hidden order of the world, the nocturnal order, or the universe of the unsaid, of perceptual automatisms and emotional incongruities."
Carlos E. Uchôa Fagundes
FAGUNDES, Carlos E. Uchôa. Lia Menna Barreto e a ordem oculta do mundo. In: Salão Arte Pará, 14, Belém, 1995.
"Lia Menna Barreto confronts images of representation and simulacra of affection. Her work takes into account the toy's capacity to activate the child's imagination and, now, through her use of it, to recover that possibility of emotional play. Art, Argan tells us, is a precise moment of a relationship of otherness, the moment in which the Other gathers meanings from the signifying structure, the work of art, constituted by the artist. Toy and art - we are dealing not with doubles but with instances of the real.
Nor is this a process of turning toys into monsters by brutalizing them. And at no point does Menna Barreto seem interested in reducing toys to anthropomorphic metaphors. What really interests her are the possibilities, by working with toys, of intervening in an order of objects and operating in the field of the bankruptcy of reason and its crisis. Lia Menna Barreto thus works in the field of desires. The abject character of some of her works also points to an economy of the symbolic order. An overload of the unconscious circulates through the meanders of a panicked functionality. Abject matter produces meanings in the process of forming subjectivity. In the work, the toy then reveals itself as a language game. In Menna Barreto's work, the experience is one of unlearning and transgression. The crisis, more precisely, is that of the subject itself."
Paulo Herkenhoff
HERKENHOFF, Paulo. Quase brinquedos de Lia Menna Barreto. In: BARRETO, Lia Menna. Lia Menna Barreto: ordem noturna. Rio de Janeiro: Thomas Cohn Arte Contemporânea, 1995.
Solo Exhibitions
1985 - Porto Alegre RS - Solo, at Margs
1987 - Porto Alegre RS - Solo, at Galeria Arte & Fato
1990 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Solo, at Thomas Cohn Arte Contemporânea
1992 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Solo, at Thomas Cohn Arte Contemporânea
1993 - São Paulo - Solo, at Galeria Camargo Vilaça
1994 - Porto Alegre RS - Solo, at Galeria Iberê Camargo
1994 - São Paulo - Solo, at Galeria Camargo Vilaça
1995 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Ordem Noturna [Nocturnal Order], at Thomas Cohn Arte Contemporânea
1996 - São Paulo SP - Origem do Afeto [Origin of Affection], at Galeria Camargo Vilaça
1997 - Porto Alegre RS - Kit Afetivo [Affective Kit], at Torreão
1998 - Porto Alegre RS - Exercícios Afetivos [Affective Exercises], at Margs
2000 - São Paulo SP - Solo, at Galeria Camargo Vilaça
2000 - Porto Alegre RS - Diário de uma Boneca [Diary of a Doll], at Galeria de Arte Contemporânea Obra Aberta
2000 - Lisbon (Portugal) - Solo, at Galeria Pedro Cera
2003 - Porto Alegre RS - Solo, at Bolsa de Arte
Group Exhibitions
1983 - Porto Alegre RS - 12th Young Artist Salon
1984 - Curitiba PR - 3rd Brazilian Drawing Show
1985 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 8th National Visual Arts Salon, at MAM/RJ
1988 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 10th National Visual Arts Salon, at Funarte - acquisition prize
1988 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Projeto Macunaíma 88 [Macunaíma Project 88]
1989 - Brasília DF - Novos Valores da Arte Latino-Americana [New Talents of Latin American Art], at MAB/DF - guest artist
1989 - Porto Alegre RS - Arte Sul 89, at Margs
1991 - São Paulo SP - 22nd Panorama of Current Brazilian Art, at MAM/SP - guest artist
1992 - Porto Alegre RS - 2nd Sculpture Show, at Centro Municipal de Cultura
1992 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Brazilian Contemporary Art Project, at Funarte and EAV/Parque Lage
1992 - São Paulo SP - Um Olhar sobre o Figurativo [A Look at the Figurative], at Casa Triângulo
1993 - Bogotá (Colombia) - Brazil Hoy [Brazil Today], at Valenzuela & Klenner Galeria
1993 - Brasília DF - A Look at Joseph Beuys, at Fundação Athos Bulcão
1993 - Porto Alegre RS - Group show, at Casa de Cultura Mario Quintana
1993 - Porto Alegre RS - O Espírito Pop - Influências na Arte Atual do Rio Grande do Sul [The Pop Spirit - Influences on Current Art in Rio Grande do Sul], at MAC/RS
1993 - São Paulo SP - A Presença do Ready-Made, 80 Anos [The Presence of the Ready-Made, 80 Years], at MAC/USP
1993 - Washington (United States) - Brazil, Images of the 80's & 90's, at Art Museum of the Americas
1994 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Brazil: Images of the 1980s and 1990s, at MAM/RJ
1994 - San Juan (Puerto Rico) - Pequeño Formato Latinoamericano 94, at Luigi Marrozzini Gallery
1994 - São Paulo SP - Brazil: Images of the 1980s and 1990s, at Casa das Rosas
1994 - São Paulo SP - Gilberto Chateaubriand Collection, at Casa das Rosas
1994 - São Paulo SP - Coletiva de Escultura [Sculpture Group Show], at Espaço Namour
1995 - Belém PA - 14th Arte Pará Salon - guest artist
1995 - Porto Alegre RS - GesamtKunstwerk, at Instituto Goethe
1995 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - A Infância Perversa: fábulas sobre a memória e o tempo [Perverse Childhood: Fables on Memory and Time], at MAM/RJ
1995 - Salvador BA - A Infância Perversa: fábulas sobre a memória e o tempo [Perverse Childhood: Fables on Memory and Time], at MAM/BA
1995 - São Paulo SP - The 1980s: The Stage of Diversity, at Galeria de Arte do Sesi
1996 - Buenos Aires (Argentina) - América Latina 96 [Latin America 96], at Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes
1996 - Buenos Aires (Argentina) - Objetos: 8 artistas de los países del Mercosur [Objects: 8 Artists from the Mercosur Countries]
1996 - São Paulo SP - 15 Brazilian Artists, at MAM/SP
1997 - Mexico City (Mexico) - Así está la cosa: instalación y arte objeto en América Latina [That's How Things Are: Installation and Object Art in Latin America], at Centro Cultural Arte Contemporáneo
1997 - Havana (Cuba) - 6th Havana Biennial, at Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam
1997 - Lisbon (Portugal) - Projeto 15 Bandeiras [15 Flags Project], at Culturgest
1997 - Los Angeles (United States) - Los Angeles Biennial
1997 - Porto Alegre RS - 1st Mercosul Visual Arts Biennial, at Fundação Bienal de Artes Visuais do Mercosul
1997 - Porto Alegre RS - Último Lustro [Last Five Years], at DC-Navegantes
1997 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 15 Brazilian Artists, at MAM/RJ
1997 - São Paulo SP - Three-Dimensionality in 20th-Century Brazilian Art, at Itaú Cultural
1998 - Aachen (Germany) - Der Brasilianische Blick [The Brazilian Gaze], at Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst
1998 - Belo Horizonte MG - Three-Dimensionality in 20th-Century Brazilian Art, at Itaú Cultural
1998 - Berlin (Germany) - Der Brasilianische Blick, at Haus der Kulturen der Welt
1998 - Brasília DF - Three-Dimensionality in 20th-Century Brazilian Art, at Itaugaleria
1998 - Heidenheim (Germany) - Der Brasilianische Blick, at Kunstmuseum
1998 - Lisbon (Portugal) - Das Vanguardas ao Fim do Milênio [From the Avant-Gardes to the End of the Millennium], at Culturgest
1998 - Penápolis SP - Three-Dimensionality in 20th-Century Brazilian Art, at Itaugaleria
1998 - São Paulo SP - Cohntemporânea, at Galeria Thomas Cohn
1998 - São Paulo SP - Der Brasilianische Blick, at Galeria Camargo Vilaça
1998 - Wiesbaden (Germany) - Quase Nada [Almost Nothing], at Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden
1999 - Graz (Austria) - The Anagrammatical Body, at Neue Galerie Graz/Kunsthaus Mürzzuschlag
1999 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Cotidiano/Arte. Objeto Anos 60/90 [Everyday/Art. The Object, 1960s/90s], at MAM/RJ
1999 - São Paulo SP - Cotidiano/Arte. Objeto Anos 60/90 [Everyday/Art. The Object, 1960s/90s], at Itaú Cultural
2000 - Novo Hamburgo RS - Mostra Itinerante do Acervo do MAC [Touring Show of the MAC Collection], at Centro Universitário Feevale
2000 - San Diego (United States) - Ultrabaroque, at Museum of Contemporary Art
2001 - Lisbon (Portugal) - Playground, at Galeria Pedro Cera
2001 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Blind Mirror: Selections from a Contemporary Collection, at Paço Imperial
2001 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Blind Mirror: Selections from a Contemporary Collection, at Paço Imperial
2001 - São Paulo SP - 27th Panorama of Brazilian Art, at MAM/SP
2001 - São Paulo SP - Caminhos da Forma [Paths of Form], at Galeria de Arte do Sesi
2001 - São Paulo SP - Chelpa Ferro and Lia Menna Barreto, at Galeria Fortes Vilaça
2001 - São Paulo SP - Blind Mirror: Selections from a Contemporary Collection, at MAM/SP
2001 - São Paulo SP - Blind Mirror: Selections from a Contemporary Collection, at MAM/SP
2002 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 27th Panorama of Brazilian Art, at MAM/RJ
2002 - Salvador BA - 27th Panorama of Brazilian Art, at MAM/BA
2002 - São Paulo SP - Insólitos [Unusual], at Espaço MAM/Villa-Lobos
2002 - São Paulo SP - Paralela, in a warehouse at Avenida Matarazzo, 530
2002 - São Paulo SP - Rotativa Fase 2 [Rotating Phase 2], at Galeria Fortes Vilaça
2002 - São Paulo SP - Territórios [Territories], at Instituto Tomie Ohtake
2002 - Toronto (Canada) - Ultrabaroque: Aspects of Post-Latin American Art, at Art Gallery of Ontario
2003 - Porto Alegre RS - 4th Mercosul Visual Arts Biennial, at Cais do Porto
2003 - São Paulo SP - My Friends, at Espaço MAM/Villa-Lobos
2003 - São Paulo SP - Order and Vertigo, at CCBB
2004 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - New Acquisitions 2003: Gilberto Chateaubriand Collection, at MAM/RJ
Source: Itaú Cultural
