SAO PAULO, BRAZIL.- The Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo – MAM – presents the exhibit “Sem Título, 2006. Comodato Eduardo Brandão e Jan Fjeld”. The exhibit is of 145 works, out of a total of approximately 270 from the collection of the Paulistano Eduardo Brandão and the Norwegian Jan Fjeld. Initiated in the ‘80s, the collection now enters the museum on loan.

Curator Andrés Martín Hernández (MAM-SP executive coordinator) and researcher Carolina Soares are displaying the show in the Grande Sala, with photographs, engravings, paintings, books by artists, paintings, designs, and video. This loan, the largest the museum has ever received, strengthens MAM’s interest in filling historical gaps and in making its collection more visible.

The exhibit in the Grande Sala is sponsored by Banco Real ABN Amro, Itaú, and Votorantim, while Projeto Parede (Wall Project) has the sponsorship of Credit Suisse.

Like the loan, the Wall exhibit is formed by small anthologies, vibrant niches of contemporary Brazilian art. Tatiana Ferraz’s museography, with the design of a long wall in zigzag, enhances both the exhibition of the works on the wall and the tridimentionals scattered in the niches, where some artists are well represented, two of whom are José Leonilson (1957-1993) and Geraldo de Barros (1923-1998). Further below are the names of the artists in the exhibit and in the loan.

Five modules marked by variations of gray may suggest a guide to the collection: (1) infected images, (2) the signs of the zodiac and the senses, (3) evocations and reminiscences, (4) books by artists, and (5) life as a map. The map as the body. The body as the tracing of a game. The divisions gather works that have affinities in poetic and/or technical approaches.

The force of the exhibit is guaranteed by the overall quality of the works and the poetic peculiarities – because the affective relationship between the collectors and the artists is part of the formation of the collection. Works of all of the artists represented in the loan are also on display in the exhibit.

By means of wall texts, curators Andrés Martín Hernández and Carolina Soares stress that the exhibit as much as the examples from the loan have a poetic relation in the root of their formation. Artists ceded works to the collectors as if they formed diaries of relationships.

According to the curators, the name of the exhibit is hinged to artistic terminology. Customarily, when an artist does not want to give a name to his work, he places “untitled.” Or if he thinks the work is enough in itself and does not need a name, or if he desists from the effort of showing the way to understanding what he produced, he simply does not name it. The work speaks for itself. The curators wish to create this parallel: there is no title that can sufficiently address this loan. It reaffirms that clippings about the loan will gathered and presented at future shows..

Some of the loan’s works shall be shown in the “Artphotography in Brazil” exhibit consisting of a selection of the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo collection from September 21, 2006 to January 7, 2007, at the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, in Spain. Negotiations for the loan commenced last year and were intermediated by MAM director Tadeu Chiarelli.

This the largest loan to MAM has a term of three years, which may be revalidated for a longer period of time. MAM also has loans of works by Farnese de Andrade, Carlos Fajardo (the sculpture in the Sculpture Garden), Ana Maria Tavares, Sérvulo Esmeraldo, and of the French artist Louise Bourgeois (“Aranha,” on permanent display outside the museum). The MAM collection is formed by acquisitions and donations, the first of which was in 1967 by Carlo Tamagni.

Eduardo Brandão, 49, who has a gallery in the city, is a photographer. Jan Fjeld, 46, is a journalist and has been in Brazil for 24 years.