LONDON.- From 12 April to 24 May, Sotheby’s S|2 London will present two brand new solo exhibitions of works, by two artists associated with the rise of Brazilian modernism in the 20th century.

Gallery One will comprise the first UK exhibition of iconoclastic Brazilian multimedia artist and ‘romantic revolutionary’ Flávio de Carvalho (1899-1973), and will be co-curated by acclaimed curator, editor and writer Kiki Mazzucchelli. Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1899, Carvalho was an influential painter, sculptor, scenographer, designer, architect, journalist, writer and playwright, whose high-profile and often provocative investigations into performance art, and determination to attract interest from the media and press, became a key part of his oeuvre. This exhibition is organised in collaboration with Leme/AD Gallery, São Paulo.

On view concurrently in Gallery Two will be a solo exhibition of works by Brazilian artist Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato (1900-1995). Despite shared geographical and chronological overlap with the career of Carvalho, Lorenzato was a primarily self-taught ‘outsider’ artist, whose richly textured and intimate paintings portray observations of everyday life. Having remained widely unknown outside of his hometown until now, Lorenzato’s work is the present subject of an overdue reassessment within the context of Brazilian modernism and international art history.

FLÁVIO DE CARVALHO (1899-1973)
A precursor to the present day multimedia artist, Flávio de Carvalho used his many talents and eccentric, irreverent forms of expression to shock the bourgeoisie.
Carvalho spent his formative years in Paris, before attaining a degree in civil engineering from the University of Durham in 1922. Having absorbed many of the movements pervading Western Europe at the time, including the work of the German Bauhaus and the writings of Sigmund Freud, he soon returned to São Paulo to begin constructing his own architectural designs, and competed in public architecture contests including that for the Government Palace of the State of São Paulo in 1927. His projects were considered pioneers of modern architecture.

In the early 1930s Carvalho opened his own architectural practice, but soon became known for his theatrical and artistic performances – an output which was heavily underscored by his understanding of the media as an arena for public performance and creative expression. In one of Carvalho’s most famed performances, the artist wore a green cap to a religious procession which forbade male head coverings - a deliberately provocative act intended to test the reaction of a mob (Experience #2, 1931). Carvalho was almost lynched by the religious crowd, and newspapers throughout São Paulo reported the incident, but, having been tactically informed by the artist's personal statement to the police, they inevitably became part of Carvalho’s premeditated performance. Later, in 1956, Carvalho caused a scandal in the centre of São Paulo with New Look, a performance involving tropical male suit comprising a skirt and blouse. Almost a decade before the emergence of video art, Carvalho’s flaunting in his original summer attire was covered live on television, before the artist himself appeared in a televised interview.

Reflecting the artist’s boundary-pushing multi-media outputs, a collection of striking paintings and drawings by the artist will be on view at S|2. Carvalho's paintings and drawings were first shown at the Modern Salon organised in 1931 by architect Lúcio Costa (1902-1998) at the National School of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro – which included portraits and nudes with a personal Expressionist accent. In 1934, his first solo exhibition was temporarily suspended, and five canvases confiscated for obscenity. Over a decade later the artist caused a sensation when he showed a set of nine charcoal drawings of his mother on her deathbed. As a painter, Carvalho was acclaimed not only in Brazil but in Western Europe, Soviet Russia and the US, and his renowned expressionistic portraits of personalities are held in museums worldwide.

The exhibition will be co-curated by esteemed independent curator, editor and writer Kiki Mazzucchelli:

“Flávio de Carvalho was a visionary architect, artist, performer, theatre director, designer, cultural promoter, and writer whose immense contribution to the avant-gardes of the 20th century remains unappreciated. With this exhibition we hope to begin to shed some light on the complexity and continued relevance of his work today.”

AMADEO LUCIANO LORENZATO (1900-1995)
In Gallery Two, S│2 presents a solo exhibition of paintings by Brazilian artist Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato. Born in 1900, Lorenzato was largely self-taught, developing his technical proficiency in painting through various vacancies he obtained as a mural painter in Brazil, and later, restoring frescoes in Rome. With a profound and natural curiosity for the arts, Lorenzato educated himself on movements across art history, although he never ascribed to any one particular school or movement. Instead, the artist’s oeuvre derived from a pure dedication to painting the world he saw through his own eyes.

Among the foremost Brazilian artists of his generation, Lorenzato’s geometric style and richly textured paintings centre on his fastidious observations of the everyday subjects he encountered in his hometown of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Using a vibrant palette of self-made pigments, his work comprises land-and townscapes, favelas, and the people he came across in his meandering walks through town.
S|2 focuses on Lorenzato’s artistic practice from the last three decades of his career in Brazil, drawing on the essential motifs and methods that occupied him throughout his life. Small in scale yet abound with expression, the seminal works on view almost veer into abstraction, achieved with thick, rough-edged brushes, combs and sharps forks, which add depth to the surface of the canvas. In all of his paintings, Lorenzato masterfully uses colour to delineate space and distil objects down to their essential forms.

Appreciated during his lifetime by artists including the leading Brazilian sculptor Amílcar de Castro (1920–2002), with whom he was included in a group exhibition at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo in 2018, Lorenzato was nevertheless relatively unknown outside of his hometown of Belo Horizonte, and his work has only recently been considered within the broader context of Brazilian modernism. In 2014, the artist’s work was the subject of two solo exhibitions, one at Galeria Estação and the other at Bergamin & Gomide, both in São Paulo, which were organised by the artists Alexandre da Cunha and Rivane Neuenschwander, testifying to Lorenzato’s continued relevance today. David Zwirner in London recently held a solo exhibition of the artist’s work – a debut solo presentation of Lorenzato’s work outside of Brazil, and the first time his work has been shown in the UK.