Vera Martins (São Paulo SP 1962)
Visual artist.
Works the course Working with used materials - sculpture, object found, at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo - MAC/USP in 1989. The following year, he participated in workshops with Iole de Freitas, Dudi Maia Rosa and Carlos Fajardo. Coordinates the Sculpture with Scrap, Art and Advertising Illustration and Introduction to Advertising Art workshops, at the Amácio Mazzaropi Cultural Workshop, between 1990 and 1991. This same year, he is studying observation drawing with Carlos Fajardo and works with a workshop with Antonio Dias; He also participates in the 18th CCBEU Youth Art Salon, in Santos. In 1996, he teaches painting at the Brazilian Museum of Sculpture - MUBE, in São Paulo, and participates in the Collectives Avesso do Avesso, in São Paulo, and the only, the same, the A-Fundamento, in the same city. In 2000, she was awarded the Vitae Scholarship, granted by Fundação Vitae, and is part of the collective exhibitions Os Anjos are back and ars erotica: sex in Brazilian art, both in the capital of São Paulo. The following year, he coordinates workshops with patients at the Pinel Psychiatric Hospital, in addition to holding the individual exhibition dematerializing the painting support, at the Oswald de Andrade Cultural Workshop, in São Paulo. A year later, he returns to exhibiting individually with a cloister and, in 2007, with a gallery 1500mts.
Critical Comment
In the early 1990s, Vera Martins develops a series of Reliefs on canvas, taking the square as the basis for its compositional and constructive exercises, always combined with an opaque and sober chromaticism. Such works have their origin in the visits made by the artist to the Cemetery of Freguesia do Ó, a neighborhood located in the northern region of the city of São Paulo. From these visits, Vera Martins incorporates the close observation of the funerary drawers and their geometric regularity, recorded in numerous photographs, in addition to the dismal tone of the emotions captured there. Using tarpaulins, fabrics, tempera, the artist builds her poetics by merging funeral theme and materic structure: her geometric shapes impregnated with pigments of oxidized tones lead to a feeling of anguish, the Saturated chromatic opacity of screens alludes to a certain tomb obscurity and the weight of closed tones carries the evocation of absences. In this way, the artist seeks to plastically formalize issues related to the feelings of loneliness, incommunicability, religion, sex. As the critic Tadeu Chiarelli observes, the artist's self-imposed difficulty is to feed his own work with such issues - feelings of loneliness, repressed sexual impulses, death, etc. - without, however, giving up the possibility of exploring the elements typical of traditional artistic modalities, especially those linked to painting and drawing itself. Following the lessons of older Brazilian artists such as Amilcar de Castro and Mira Schendel, Vera Martins understands that it is perfectly possible to interpret any feeling existing in the world through the operation of the plane and the line.
Criticism
"The artistic language De Vera Martins reflects primordial instances of the human condition, talks about life, sexuality, death, without, however, submitting to a narrative bias. meanings and articulating them within the scope of the plastic issues in which they are inserted. These questions, which have recently been more and more cleaned up, have been linked, above all, to old concerns related to death. For a long time, she visited cemeteries, in particular that of the parish of Ó, in São Paulo, with persistence photographing the walls full of juxtaposed funerary drawers, small squares always the same, always regular, in which a small photograph, a name, a candle intend to protect an identity forever lost".
Stella Teixeira de Barros
MARTINS, Vera. paintings and objects. São Paulo: Valu Oria Art Gallery, 1998.
Colleges
Colégio Sift Keppel - Hilchenbach (Germany)
Anthroposophical School Rudolf Steiner - Hagen (Germany)
Cultural Space Banco Central do Brasil - São Paulo SP
Fundação Biblioteca Nacional - Rio de Janeiro RJ
Ceará Contemporary Art Museum - MAC - Fortaleza CE
Museum of Modern Art - MAM/SP - São Paulo SP
Museum Del Barrio - New York (United States)
National Museum  de Fine Arts - MNBA - Rio de Janeiro RJ
Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo - Pesp - São Paulo SP
Individual exhibitions
1991 - São Paulo SP - Individual, at the Chap Chap Cultural Space
1993 - Brasília DF - Individual, at Itaugaleria
1994 - São Paulo SP - Individual, at the São Paulo Cultural Center
1998 - São Paulo SP - Individual, at Valu Oria Art Gallery
2001 - São Paulo SP - Dematerializing the Painting Support (Artist &Nbsp;Residente Project), at the Oswald de Andrade Cultural Workshop
2002 - São Paulo SP - Cloister, at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo
2007 - São Paulo SP - Galeria 1500mts, at Instituto Pensarte
2012 - São Paulo SP - Individual, at the Jaqueline Martins gallery
Collective exhibitions
1989 - São Paulo SP - 18th Bunkyo Salon, at the Brazilian Society of Japanese Culture
1990 - Avaré SP - Avaré Plastic Arts Salon
1990 - Araras SP - 26th Ararense Salon
1990 - Caraguatatuba SP - Collective, at the Jabaquara Cultural Center
1990 - Limeira SP - 17th Limeirense Salon of Art Contemporary
1991 - Santos SP - 27th Youth Art Salon, at CCBEU
1991 - São Paulo SP - Collective, at the Banco Central do Brasil Cultural Space
1991 - São Paulo SP - Collective, at Espaço Cultural Cásper Libero
1992 - Santo André SP - 20th Contemporary Art Salon of Santo André, at the Municipal Palace
1992 - São Paulo SP - 7th Brazilian Art Salon, at the Mokiti Okada Foundation - M.O.A.
1993 - Curitiba PR - 50th Salão Paranaense, Museum of Contemporary Art - Special Mention of the Jury
1993 - Piracicaba SP - 25th Contemporary Art Salon of Piracicaba
1993 - Ribeirão Preto SP - 18th Art Salon of Ribeirão Preto, at the Ribeirão Preto Art Museum Pedro Manuel-Ghismondi - Special Mention of the Jury
1993 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 13th National Salon of Plastic Arts, at Palácio Gustavo Capanema - Acquisition Award
1993 - São Paulo SP - Brazil: small formats, few words, in the Documenta Gallery of Art
1993 - Santo André SP - Reason and Mystery, at the Municipal Palace
1993 - São Paulo SP - Gunther Award, at MAC/USP
1994 - New Mexico (United States) - Collective, at The Dartmouth Street Gallery
1994 - Albuquerque (United States) - Arts of the Americas 1994, at the Tamarind Institute
1994 - Campinas SP - in Extremis, at the José Pancetti Museum of Contemporary Art
1994 - Ribeirão Preto SP - 19th Ribeirão Preto Art Salon - Special Mention of the Jury
1994 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 14th National Salon of Plastic Arts, at Palácio Gustavo Capanema (Rio de Janeiro, RJ) - Acquisition Award
1994 - São Paulo SP - Mirrors and Shadows, at the Museum of Modern Art
1994 - São Paulo SP - São Paulo Poetics: Module I, at the Citibank Cultural Space
1994 - São Paulo SP - Annual Program for Plastic Arts Exhibitions, at the São Paulo Cultural Center
1995 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 15th National Salon of Plastic Arts, at the National Museum of Fine Arts
1995 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Mirrors and Sombras, at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil
1995 - Santos SP - 5th National Biennial of Santos, at the Patrícia Galvão Cultural Center - Guest Artist
1996 - São Paulo SP - Contemporary Brazilian Art: Recent Donations/96, at the Museum of Modern Art
1996 - São Paulo SP - Atelier Santa Cecília, at the Multiple Art Gallery
1996 - São Paulo SP - Avesso do Avesso, in the Paço das Artes
1996 - São Paulo SP - the only one same, the A-Fundamento, in the Valu Oria Art Gallery
1997 - Madrid (Spain) - Arco, at the Stad Valu Oria
1998 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Brazilian art in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo: Recent Donations 1996 - 1998, at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil
1999 - Curitiba PR - 56th Salão Paranaense, at the Museum of Contemporary Art
1999 - Curitiba PR - 5th João Turin Sculpture Exhibition, at Casa João Turin - State Secretary of Culture Award
1999 - São Paulo SP - Night, at the collection of the Museum of Modern Art - MAM
2000 - Santos SP - 7th Santos National Biennial, at the Patrícia Galvão Cultural Center
2000 - São Paulo SP - Ars Erotica: Sex and Eroticism in Brazilian Art, at the Museum of Modern Art
2000 - São Paulo SP - Os Anjos are back, at the Pinacoteca do Estado
2001 - Campinas SP - Art in the City - Coca Cola Project, Cultural Living Center - Pça Fluminese, Cambuí
2001 - Hagen (Germany) - Exchange of Frauen Kunst Forums - Cultural Center of Essen and Anthroposophical School Rudolf Steiner Waldorfschule
2001 - New York (United States) - The Unraveled: Contemporary Brazilian Art, at El Museo del Barrio
2002 - Buenos Aires (Argentina) - The Thread Unraveled: Contemporary Brazilian Art, at the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires
2002 - Madrid (Spain) - ARCO/2002
2002 - São Paulo SP - Genius Loci: the spirit of the place, in the streets of the Vila Buarque neighborhood
2002 - São Paulo SP - The line as a structure of the form, in the MAM space - Villa-Lobos
2002 - Paulo SP - The Organic in Collapse, at Valu Oria Art Gallery
2005 - São Paulo SP - Collective, at the Estrela do Pari Futebol Clube
2005 - São Paulo SP - Erotica: the senses in art, at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brazil
2005 - São Paulo SP - Occupation, at the Paço das Artes
2006 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Erotic: The Senses in Art, at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil
2006 - São Paulo SP - Celebration 20 Years of the Gravura Club, at MAM/SP
2009 - São Paulo SP - Textile Poetics, at the Oswaldo de Andrade Cultural Workshop
2009 - São Paulo SP - SP-Arte - D'Concept
2010 - São Paulo SP - SP-Arte - D'Concept
2011 - São Paulo SP - Contemporary Art Award 2011, at Funarte
2011 - São Paulo SP - SP-Arte - D'Concept
Source: Itaú Cultural
