Maria Helena Chartuni (São Paulo SP 1942)
Sculptor, painter, restorer, draftswoman and illustrator.
She studied painting with Luigi Zanotto (1919 - 1989). With a prize won in a textile print design contest, she visited Europe in 1967. Years later, she returned to take a painting restoration course in London (England). In Brazil, she worked as a restorer at Masp, São Paulo, where she restored the image of Nossa Senhora Aparecida, destroyed during an attack in 1978. In 1979, she created the Trabalho e Lazer (Work and Leisure) trophy for the 1st Brazilian Cinema Festival at Cinesesc. In the 1980s, she illustrated every issue of the magazine Mirante das Artes. As a sculptor, she created the monument to Pope John Paul II, in Curitiba, and the sculpture of Nossa Senhora da Conceição for the show Bandeira da Divina Graça, by Romero Andrade de Lima.
Critiques
"Her works (M. H. Chartuni), in the various fields to which she is dedicated, have maintained an expression that combines Pop Art, New Figuration and a certain expressionism, with a view to criticizing aspects of contemporary life."
Roberto Pontual
PONTUAL, Roberto. Dicionário das artes plásticas no Brasil. Introduction by Antônio Houaiss. Texts by Mário Barata et al. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1969.
"The visitor will discover on the canvases metaphysical, or rather, ontological investigations, questioning the symbolism of the figurations staged, a reality rich in interferences, intuitions and even a touch of the surreal, which has come to be defined as an 'open work', accentuating the ambiguities in the answers to as many questions as the inquirer may raise (...). From the artist's beginnings, I had noticed her attention to colors, to forms, to the images of an ever renewed and recomposed reality, tending toward a harmony between the represented and the observer. Once again, it is about understanding, comprehending; visitor and artist, at the same time participants and result: fantasy coming to help define what we cannot define. In the evolution of form and its disputes, with 'Ut pictura poesis' now out of use, a new concept applies, no longer literary: the artist directly achieves, in everyday life, a new poetics and a subjective representation of what happens in life, the painter defining how much she chooses to show. (...) faithful to the tradition of kinship between painting and poetry, (...) it seems to me that Maria Helena, consciously, peers out of one of the many windows of the labyrinth at social connotations, platonic bundles of characters, juxtapositions of recognizable animals and of her own creation which, I don't know why, occasionally make me think of the much-discussed fictions of Fernando Pessoa, the ones he called 'autopsychographies' (...)".
P. M. Bardi
M. H. CHARTUNI. Introduction by Pietro Maria Bardi. Introduction by Ricardo Camargo. São Paulo: Studio José Duarte de Aguiar, 1984.
Solo Exhibitions
1964 - São Paulo SP - Solo, at Galeria Selearte
1967 - São Paulo SP - Solo, at Galeria Mirante das Artes
1984 - São Paulo SP - Solo, at Studio José Duarte de Aguiar
1989 - São Paulo SP - Solo, at Studio José Duarte de Aguiar
1995 - São Paulo SP - Solo, at Renato Magalhães Gouvêa Escritório de Arte
Group Exhibitions
1963 - São Paulo SP - 7th São Paulo International Biennial, at Fundação Bienal
1965 - São Paulo SP - 2nd Young National Drawing Exhibition, at MAC/USP
1965 - Tokyo (Japan) - 8th Tokyo Biennial
1966 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - O Artista e a Máquina [The Artist and the Machine], at MAM/RJ
1966 - São Paulo SP - 8 Artistas [8 Artists], at Atrium
1966 - São Paulo SP - O Artista e a Máquina [The Artist and the Machine], at Masp
1967 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Nova Objetividade Brasileira [New Brazilian Objectivity], at MAM/RJ
1967 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Salão das Caixas [Salon of Boxes], at Petite Galerie - acquisition prize
1968 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - O Artista Brasileiro e a Iconografia de Massa [The Brazilian Artist and Mass Iconography], at Esdi
1968 - São Paulo SP - 17th São Paulo Salon of Modern Art
1969 - São Paulo SP - 1st São Paulo Contemporary Art Salon, at Masp
1969 - São Paulo SP - Group show, at Paço das Artes
1969 - São Paulo SP - 1st Panorama of Current Brazilian Art, at MAM/SP
1973 - Brussels (Belgium) - Imagem do Brasil [Image of Brazil], organized and directed by Pietro Maria Bardi
1975 - São Paulo SP - Group show, at Centro Campestre do Sesc
1978 - Brussels (Belgium) - Criatividade na Arte Brasileira Contemporânea [Creativity in Contemporary Brazilian Art], at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium
1978 - São Paulo SP - 1st Latin American Biennial
1979 - São Paulo SP - Arte Erótica [Erotic Art], at Galeria de Arte Aplicada
1979 - São Paulo SP - Cinco Séculos de Arte Brasileira [Five Centuries of Brazilian Art], at Masp
1980 - Santiago (Chile) - 20 Pintores Brasileños [20 Brazilian Painters], at Academia Chilena de Bellas Artes
1981 - Bogotá (Colombia) - 10 Artistas Brasileños [10 Brazilian Artists], at Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá
1982 - Japan - Mie Prefectural Art Museum
1982 - São Paulo SP - Um Século de Escultura no Brasil [A Century of Sculpture in Brazil], at Masp
1986 - Ludwigshafen (Germany) - Brasilianische Künstler [Brazilian Artists], at BASF
1988 - Verona (Italy) - La Memoria dell'Immagine [The Memory of the Image], at Palazzo Forti
1989 - São Paulo SP - Escultura no Brasil [Sculpture in Brazil], at Espaço Cultural Sudameris
1990 - Alexandria (United States) - 3 Latin American Artists
1995 - São Paulo SP - Projeto Arte Atual Brasil [Current Brazilian Art Project], at Renato Magalhães Gouvêa Escritório de Arte
Source: Itaú Cultural
