Mário Gruber (Santos SP 1927 - Cotia SP 2011)
Mário Gruber was a painter, printmaker, sculptor and muralist, whose artistic career was marked by versatility and work in many different media. Self-taught, he began painting in 1943. In 1946, he moved to São Paulo and enrolled at the Escola de Belas Artes, where his teachers included the sculptor Nicolau Rollo. The following year, he won first prize in painting at the exhibition of the group 19 Pintores [19 Painters], demonstrating his expressive talent from the very start of his career.
In 1948, he held his first solo exhibition and furthered his printmaking studies with Poty, as well as beginning a collaboration with the renowned artist Di Cavalcanti. In 1949, he received a scholarship and moved to Paris, where he studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts with the printmaker Édouard Goerg and worked with Candido Portinari. He returned to Brazil in 1951 and founded the Clube de Gravura [Printmaking Club] in his hometown, which later became the Clube de Arte [Art Club].
He taught printmaking at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo in 1953 and taught metal engraving at the Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado (FAAP) between 1961 and 1964. In 1970, he set up his printmaking studio in São Paulo. Between 1974 and 1978, he lived in Paris again and, on returning to Brazil, settled in Olinda, Pernambuco. In 1979, he set up a studio in New York, further broadening his international artistic exchange.
Back in São Paulo, he began creating large-scale works for public spaces, such as the panels for the Sé metro station and the Memorial da América Latina. Even in the 2000s, Mário Gruber maintained an intense output, producing between 100 and 120 works a year.
Critical Commentary
Self-taught, Mário Gruber began painting in the mid-1940s, with a production linked to expressionism. In 1949, he received a scholarship from the French government and went to Paris, where he devoted himself to studying painting and printmaking. He returned to Brazil in 1951. In his graphic work of this period, he approached the social realism practiced by other artists associated with the printmaking clubs. The city, its streets and houses are the subjects of his graphic production.
Mário Gruber also produced figurative paintings, starting from everyday images, such as life in the big cities, and drawing them into games of imagination. The artist creates fantastic characters, using contrasting colors reminiscent of the work of the Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) and the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez (1599-1660). From the 1970s, he began using resources of the photographic process, such as enlargement, to create new kinds of images. He also explored the languages of television and cinema. He maintained a constant dialogue with the tradition of art history, as in the 1985 exhibition in which he recreated canvases by the Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) and the French painter Georges de La Tour (1593-1652), making enlargements from these artists' paintings and capturing the drama and dynamics of light present in their works.
Refined luminosity, a tightly controlled color range and free brushwork are present in later paintings such as Balão Verde e Preto [Green and Black Balloon] (1996). By creating characters who are often masked figures, magicians, angels and robots, Gruber produces works that cause a sense of strangeness and relate to themes linked to fantastic realism.
Critiques
"Mário Gruber is one of the most singular artistic personalities in the São Paulo art scene. He began his career right after the Second World War as a young avant-garde artist with boldly expressionist tendencies. He then went to Europe, where he felt deeply the impact of the great tradition of Western painting, from the Renaissance to Courbet. Since then Gruber has been seized by a passion for the art of oil painting of Rembrandt, Velázquez, Rubens, Goya, Delacroix and Courbet, whose final chords he found in Van Gogh. (...) Endowed with an extraordinary capacity as a painter and the methodical patience of a researcher, Gruber acquired a surprising command of the pictorial technique of the great masters of the European tradition (...). The purpose of Gruber's technical refinement, pursued in a direction apparently contrary to that of the currents of 20th-century painting, was generally misunderstood by his admirers and opponents alike. (...). Gruber was probably driven by obscure and deep intuitions and premonitions, largely foreign to the realist conceptions he advocated verbally. He was already unconsciously tending toward a very personal kind of fantastic realism. (...)"
Mario Schenberg
GRUBER. São Paulo: Portal Galeria de Arte, 1970.
"As Antonio Cândido de Melo e Souza rightly perceived, all the restlessness and variety of Mário Gruber's work can be summed up in a dichotomous attraction to the utmost realism and to forms of dreamlike transcendence of the real. These are, in fact, two distinct means he uses to reach the same aim of touching, understanding and reflecting the world of today in which he lives, while also reflecting the accumulated layers of the past necessarily implicit in it. His thematic range, conveyed above all through metal engraving and painting, has thus encompassed a diverse series of interests, although the greatest constant is still the figurative imperative (...). Along the ascending density of the symbolic scale, Gruber starts from the most current everyday iconography - beings of the big cities or of cosmic conquests, familiar and recognizable landscapes, everyday objects - and little by little draws it into games of imagination, returning to his own childhood or to humanity's past while simultaneously projecting into the future, between hope and anxiety. From this come his fantastic characters, with aggressive colors and volumes (...)".
Roberto Pontual
PONTUAL, Roberto. Arte/ Brasil/ hoje: 50 anos depois. São Paulo: Collectio, 1973.
"In Mário Gruber's early prints, the city stands out, parts of it, as well as houses, from various viewpoints and under various lighting, which highlight his relationship with certain São Paulo printmakers, such as Renina Katz, and with the Rio Grande do Sul group of the Clube de Gravura. What brings these printmakers together is realism, with the exhibition held in May 1956, shortly before the invasion of Hungary and the dissolution of the Clube. While most realists, from north to south, favored woodcut and linocut, Gruber valued intaglio. This technical distinction corresponds to another which, though it does not set him apart, brings him close to certain equally socialist printmakers, such as Renina Katz or Vasco Prado, for whom the city is the theater of class struggle, as opposed to the countryside, a setting where custom softens it, the peasant being shown as backward. The depiction of the city, its streets and houses is, therefore, a feature of Gruber's realism in metal. As early as 1956 he states that technical research is essential to his art; an analogous thesis is put forward in 1992, when the figurative, which Gruber defends uncompromisingly, distinguishes the human figure, which walks a razor's edge, as he says, between form and essence. This demand, necessarily conceived within a figurative horizon, places Mário Gruber's technical research in intaglio at the intersection of a broad figurativeness. A virtuoso investigator of technique, Gruber does not allow himself virtuosity, for, even while elevating it, he does not isolate it, since he crosses it with functions of figuration".
Leon Kossovitch e Mayra Laudanna
KOSSOVITCH, Leon; LAUDANNA, Mayra. Gravura no Século XX. In: GRAVURA: arte brasileira do século XX. São Paulo: Itaú Cultural : Cosac & Naify, 2000. p.24.
Testimonials
"I was one of the first metal engravers in São Paulo. Today, tidying up my studio, I am looking again at my first plates, from 1946-1947, and at all my later work. Printmaking is a constant passion that will go on. A practically unheard-of fact is that I own all of my prints. (...)
It is a bombshell for the market, because an artist who owns his work can place it with discernment. That does not mean I am going to sell it for a fortune. (...)
I have made few color prints. I trained myself to make color prints only when I had the right conditions. Since I engrave in metal - copper - and here there is no steel facing, the copper acts as an abrasive. A yellow, for example, will always turn greenish. Out of respect for my work, I avoid using color, because it is really foolish to make a work that will fade later, or that ends up as an expression different from the one I conceived. But there is another reason too: I personally think printmaking is black and white, as I saw in Rembrandt's House, in originals engraved by him, with incredible, almost inexplicable effects. (...)
In an exhibition I held in 1967, I brought together a year's work, which led me to think about my paths. There are three forms close to the sphere: the egg, the planet, the spaceship. The first is the universe of germination, of our ancestral past, an inner content that I see as my interest in knowing a person's story when I paint his portrait. The planet is the level of an old predilection of mine, realism. I suffered a great deal for it in the days of abstraction, since only with pop art was the image once again recognized. (...)
My technique has nothing Renaissance about it, and I have not finished it yet. From the time I started until today, I have been concerned with the language of print and of the museum, mass communication, the language of the media. (...) An artist who expresses himself well has good technique. In art, I seek a media language, what fascinates without explanation".
Mário Gruber (December 22, 1975)
GRAVURA: arte brasileira do século XX. São Paulo: Itaú Cultural : Cosac & Naify, 2000. p.160.
"For me, black-and-white metal engraving is chamber music, while painting has the sound of a symphony orchestra. Approaching printmaking is always harder; it demands attention, acuity and a certain eye for detail. But whoever manages to approach it soon realizes that it is not a minor technique; on the contrary, like every chamber form it is dense, deep and has a light of its own. A light that, in my case, also serves as a reference for painting. It works, let us say, as a 'critical judgment' of the paintings I make. Because printmaking has, concisely, everything the visual arts should have: drawing, movement, expression and intensity. (...) Unlike painting, printmaking cannot be grasped only by its outer, allegorical side. It operates on a razor's edge, at the exact intersection between essence and form. Besides being a magic mirror, since it is one and many at the same time. That is why it requires a more difficult, elaborate understanding, and therein may also lie one of the causes of prejudice against it. But printmaking endures. It is not the first time it has been passed over by current taste and fashion".
Mário Gruber (September 1992)
GRAVURA: arte brasileira do século XX. São Paulo: Itaú Cultural : Cosac & Naify, 2000. p.160.
Solo Exhibitions
1947 - São Paulo SP - Mário Gruber: Metal Engravings, Clube dos Artistas e Amigos da Arte
1967 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Mário Gruber: Paintings, Galeria Ibeu Copacabana
1967 - São Paulo SP - Mário Gruber: Paintings, Galeria Atrium
1970 - São Paulo SP - Mário Gruber: Paintings, Galeria de Arte Portal
1973 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Mário Gruber: Paintings, Galeria de Arte Ipanema
1975 - São Paulo SP - Mário Gruber: Prints, Arcádia Artes e Decorações
1976 - São Paulo SP - Mário Gruber: Paintings, Renato Magalhães Gouvêa - Escritório de Arte
1979 - Santos SP - Mário Gruber: Prints, UCBEU
1979 - São Paulo SP - Mário Gruber: Paintings, Renato Magalhães Gouvêa - Escritório de Arte
1983 - São Paulo SP - Mário Gruber: Paintings, Galeria Art Selection
1985 - São Paulo SP - Mário Gruber: Archaeology of Painting - Year 85, Galeria Montesanti Roesler
1987 - São Paulo SP - Mário Gruber, Galeria Millan
1992 - Poços de Caldas MG - Mário Gruber: Retrospective of Prints 1940-1990, Casa da Cultura
1993 - São Paulo SP - Mário Gruber: Paintings, Renato Magalhães Gouvêa - Escritório de Arte
1996 - São Paulo SP - Mário Gruber: Paintings, Renato Magalhães Gouvêa - Escritório de Arte
2005 - Campinas SP - Survivor, Galeria de Arte do Instituto de Artes da Unicamp
2006 - São Paulo SP - Mario Gruber and the Metaphysics of Planes, Fundação Memorial da América Latina
2007 - Curitiba PR - Mário Gruber, 80 Years, Galeria IMS - Unibanco Arteplex
2010 - Santos SP - Angels of the Brazilian Renaissance, Pinacoteca Benedicto Calixto
2010 - São Paulo SP - Mário Gruber: Prints, Lugar Pantemporâneo
Group Exhibitions
1947 - Araraquara SP - 1st Araraquara Salon
1947 - São Paulo SP - 19 Pintores [19 Painters], Galeria Prestes Maia - 1st prize in painting
1948 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - São Paulo Painters, Ministério da Educação e Cultura
1948 - Salvador BA - 1st Bahia National Salon of Modern Art
1948 - São Paulo SP - Aldemir Martins, Mario Gruber and Enrico Camerini, Galeria Domus
1948 - São Paulo SP - 12th Salon of the Visual Artists' Union, Galeria Domus
1954 - Goiânia GO - Exhibition of the National Congress of Intellectuals
1954 - São Paulo SP - 3rd São Paulo Salon of Modern Art, Galeria Prestes Maia - bronze medal in printmaking
1955 - São Paulo SP - 4th São Paulo Salon of Modern Art, Galeria Prestes Maia
1958 - São Paulo SP - Eduardo Sued, Marcelo Grassmann, Gruber and Darel
1959 - São Paulo SP - 8th São Paulo Salon of Modern Art, Galeria Prestes Maia - acquisition prize
1962 - São Paulo SP - Exhibition, Galeria Residência
1965 - São Paulo SP - 2nd Young National Drawing Exhibition, Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo
1966 - São Paulo SP - Three Premises, Museu de Arte Brasileira
1968 - Portland (United States) - 39th International Exhibition Northwest Print Makers, Portland Art Museum
1968 - São Paulo SP - 19 Pintores [19 Painters], Tema Galeria de Arte
1968 - Seattle (United States) - 39th International Exhibition Northwest Print Makers, Seattle Art Museum
1969 - São Paulo SP - 1st Panorama of Current Brazilian Art, Museu de Arte Moderna
1970 - Medellín (Colombia) - 2nd Medellín Art Biennial, Museo de Antioquia
1970 - Portland (United States) - 41 International Exhibition Northwest Printmakers, Portland Art Museum
1970 - San Juan (Puerto Rico) - 1st Bienal de San Juan del Grabado Latinoamericano y del Caribe, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña
1970 - Seattle (United States) - 41 International Exhibition Northwest Printmakers, Seattle Art Museum Pavillion
1972 - São Paulo SP - Art/Brazil/Today: 50 Years Later, Galeria da Collectio
1972 - São Paulo SP - 2nd International Printmaking Exhibition, Museu de Arte Moderna
1976 - São Paulo SP - Young Drawing of the 1940s, Pinacoteca do Estado
1977 - São Paulo SP - The Groups: The 1940s, Museu Lasar Segall
1977 - São Paulo SP - 9th Panorama of Current Brazilian Art, Museu de Arte Moderna
1978 - São Paulo SP - 19 Pintores [19 Painters], Museu de Arte Moderna
1979 - São Paulo SP - Figurative Artists, Itaúgaleria
1979 - São Paulo SP - 11th Panorama of Current Brazilian Art, Museu de Arte Moderna
1980 - New York (United States) - Exhibition of Print and Drawings of Latin American Artists, El Museo del Barrio
1980 - São Paulo SP - Images of Dance, Paço das Artes
1982 - Penápolis SP - 5th Noroeste Visual Arts Salon, Fundação Educacional de Penápolis. Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras de Penápolis
1982 - São Paulo SP - From Modernism to the Bienal, Museu de Arte Moderna
1982 - São Paulo SP - Seascapes and Riverscapes, Museu Lasar Segall
1983 - Paris (France) - Art Against Apartheid, Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques
1983 - Paris (France) - Jeune Gravure Contemporaine et ses Invités
1984 - Mexico City (Mexico) - 4th Ibero-American Art Biennial
1984 - Copenhagen (Denmark) - Art Against Apartheid, Museu Charlottenborg
1984 - Curitiba PR - 6th Curitiba City Printmaking Show, at Fundação Cultural de Curitiba
1984 - Lund (Sweden) - Art Against Apartheid, Lunds Konsthall
1984 - São Paulo SP - Tradition and Rupture: A Synthesis of Brazilian Art and Culture, Fundação Bienal
1984 - Tampere (Finland) - Art Against Apartheid, Tampereen Nykytaiteen Museo
1985 - Amsterdam (Netherlands) - Art Against Apartheid, The New Church
1985 - Barcelona (Spain) - Art Against Apartheid, Palau Marc
1985 - Berlin (Germany) - Art Against Apartheid
1985 - Bologna (Italy) - Art Against Apartheid, Galleria d'Arte Moderna
1985 - Cáceres (Spain) - Art Against Apartheid, Museo Casa de los Caballos
1985 - Hamburg (Germany) - Art Against Apartheid
1985 - Hammamet (Tunisia) - Art Against Apartheid, Centre Culturel International d'Hammamet
1985 - Madrid (Spain) - Art Against Apartheid, Circulo de Bellas Artes
1985 - Marseille (France) - Art Against Apartheid, La Maison de L'Etranger
1985 - São Paulo SP - 100 Itaú Works, Museu de Arte de São Paulo
1985 - São Paulo SP - The Art of the Imaginary, Galeria Encontro das Artes
1985 - São Paulo SP - 18th Bienal Internacional de São Paulo, Fundação Bienal
1985 - Stuttgart (Germany) - Art Against Apartheid
1985 - Cologne (Germany) - Art Against Apartheid
1986 - Paris (France) - Los Americanos: peintres et sculpteurs d'Amerique Latine, Galerie Centre d'Art Plastique Contemporaine
1986 - São Paulo SP - 30 Highlights of Brazilian Printmaking, Trilema Espaço Cultural
1986 - São Paulo SP - The URBS in the Vision of Eight Artists, Galeria Montesanti Roesler
1986 - São Paulo SP - Before and Now: 8 Painters, Fundação Cásper Líbero
1987 - Brasília DF - São Paulo Artists in Brasília, Museu de Arte de Brasília
1987 - São Paulo SP - 20th Contemporary Art Exhibition, Chapel Art Show
1987 - São Paulo SP - The Craft of Art: Painting, Sesc
1987 - São Paulo SP - 18th Panorama of Current Brazilian Art, Museu de Arte Moderna
1988 - Curitiba PR - Marcelo Grassmann and Mário Gruber, Casa Romário Martins
1988 - São Paulo SP - 21st Chapel Art Show, Chapel Art Show
1990 - Goiânia GO - 20 Years of the Museu de Arte de Goiânia, Museu de Arte de Goiânia
1991 - São Paulo SP - 24th Contemporary Art Exhibition, Chapel Art Show
1992 - Poços de Caldas MG - Brazilian Modern Art: Collection of the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, Casa da Cultura
1992 - São Paulo SP - 25th Contemporary Art Exhibition, Chapel Art Show
1992 - São Paulo SP - Polarities/Perspectives, Paço das Artes
1993 - João Pessoa PB - Woodcut: From Cordel to the Gallery, Fundação Espaço Cultural da Paraíba
1994 - Poços de Caldas MG - Unibanco Collection: Exhibition Celebrating Unibanco's 70th Anniversary, Casa da Cultura
1994 - São Paulo SP - Flags: 60 Artists Celebrate USP's 60 Years, Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo
1994 - São Paulo SP - Bienal Brasil Século XX, Fundação Bienal
1994 - São Paulo SP - Unity and Confrontation, Escola Panamericana de Arte
1994 - São Paulo SP - Woodcut: From Cordel to the Gallery, Museu de Arte de São Paulo
1994 - São Paulo SP - Woodcut: From Cordel to the Gallery, Companhia do Metropolitano de São Paulo
1995 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Unibanco Collection: Exhibition Celebrating Unibanco's 70th Anniversary, Museu de Arte Moderna
1995 - São Paulo SP - Three Masters of Metal Engraving: Darel, Grassmann, Gruber, Museu Banespa
1995 - São Paulo SP - Visual Road, Renato Magalhães Gouvêa - Escritório de Arte
1996 - São Paulo SP - The World of Mario Schenberg, Casa das Rosas
1996 - São Paulo SP - 1st Off Bienal, Museu Brasileiro da Escultura
1997 - São Paulo SP - The City of the Artists, Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo
1997 - São Paulo SP - Two São Paulo Printmakers, Instituto Moreira Salles
1998 - Marseille (France) - Football Art
1998 - Paris (France) - Football Art
1998 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Football Art, Fundação Casa França-Brasil
1998 - São Paulo SP - Football Art, Galeria Marta Traba
1998 - São Paulo SP - The Collectors - Guita and José Mindlin: Matrices and Prints, Galeria de Arte do Sesi
1999 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Rio Printmaking Show. Brazilian Modern Printmaking: Museu Nacional de Belas Artes Collection, Museu Nacional de Belas Artes
2000 - São Paulo SP - The Human Figure in the Itaú Collection, Itaú Cultural
2000 - São Paulo SP - Sociarte Group Show, Clube Atlético Monte Líbano. Espaço Cultural
2000 - São Paulo SP - Investigations: Brazilian Printmaking, Itaú Cultural
2001 - Brasília DF - Investigations: Brazilian Printmaking, Itaugaleria
2001 - Penápolis SP - Investigations: Brazilian Printmaking, Itaugaleria
2001 - São Paulo SP - 4 Decades, Nova André Galeria
2003 - São Paulo SP - The Art Behind Art: Where Artworks Are Kept and How They Travel, Espaço MAM - Villa-Lobos
2003 - São Paulo SP - Art & Artists: Exhibition of the Nineteen Painters, Masp. Galeria Prestes Maia
2003 - São Paulo SP - Art and Society: A Controversial Relationship, Itaú Cultural
2008 - São Paulo SP - BM&F BOVESPA Collection, Espaço Cultural BM&F Bovespa
2009 - São Paulo SP - Memorial Revisited: 20 Years, Galeria Marta Traba
2009 - São Paulo SP - The Critic's Eye: ABCA Award-Winning Art and the Artistic Collection of the Palaces, Palácio dos Bandeirantes
2010 - São Paulo SP - Self-Portraits and "Self-Portraits", Lugar Pantemporâneo
2011 - São Paulo SP - Brazilian Papers: The Art of Printmaking - Masp Collection, Museu de Arte de São Paulo
Source: Itaú Cultural
