NEW YORK, NY.- Bortolami is presenting its third solo exhibition with Brazilian artist Marina Rheingantz. Iris brings together a series of turbid abstractions, oil paintings and textiles, as highly sensitive and affective research into often imperceptible yet felt phenomena—geological and meteorological shifts, the flow of tides, and atmospheric events. Rheingantz has honed a characteristic style, a blending of veil-like overlays of paint and impastoed bespecklings, that serves to describe what exists just beyond the optical, planted instead within unfolding events. While translations to topographies—the gulf between a place versus its memory, as well as the entropies it inevitably withstands—continue to inform her practice, Rheingantz’s increasingly attenuated interpretation suggests a sensitivity to the ambient over the literal.
Iris, the exhibition, is a sweeping picture of the unbounded dynamism of geographies and an understanding of the natural world by its own environmental conditions. The titular painting is a tall canvas in cadet grey, bursting with daubs of flickering yellow and seemingly congealing into depths of ash. The accretion of coagulated oils on the surface could suggest a detailed chronicling of a flower’s petals—an insistence of nature’s continuous evasion of strict design despite its proclivity for repetition. The overall blustering and seemingly spontaneous dragged vertical brush marks could also very well encase an entire lawn of these dancing flowers. Or are we instead looking through a complex lens, like the iris of the eye? We seem to reach representation only to have the illusion disintegrate into a metaphysical proposal.
The largest painting in the exhibition, Orvalho (Portuguese for dew), sprawls seventeen feet, unfurling a wake of crashing turquoise and lavenders.
Rheingantz’s gestural marks cohere into a field of accumulated loose matter, like an orchestra of dew rising and settling; wavering solidities of paint, between the impasto and diluted, wink to the activities which transition night to morning. A certain motion underlies Orvalho, not only in the field of the molecular (water evaporating into mist), but also in the physical reorientation necessary on the part of the viewer as they scan for nodes of activity in punctums of teals and fuschias. The exhibition of this reinvented impressionist vista takes place concurrently with Rheingantz’s museum exhibition at Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nîmes, in the South of France.
If Rheingantz’s paintings employ deconstructionist tendencies to suggest the lyrical interplays between place, atmosphere, and time, then her embroideries are repositories of environments in the process of being built. In preselecting thread, scale, and design, the artist embarks on experiments into how the territorial negotiates its boundaries. The repetition and differences found in
nature are doubled by the systemic patterns of stitchwork which are beholden to, yet inevitably break away from, their suggested rhythms. For this exhibition, a small room has been adorned with a jacquard produced by Rheingantz in the historic district of Lys-Lez-Lannoy in the Flanders region of the North of France. The looseness of the floral patterning belies the weight of the material and the historical precedents in jacquard design, dealing in a hybrid of density and lightness. A set of medial translations accrues, as information is imparted back and forth between painting and textile, so that both mediums become generative tissues in this process of reciprocal metabolization.
Marina Rheingantz (b.1983 Araraquara, Brazil) lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. A solo exhibition by Rheingantz is current on view at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nîmes in France.Selected solo exhibitions include Williams College Museum of Art, Massachusetts (2022); FRAC Auvergne, Clermont- Ferrand, France (2021); Nichido Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2016); Centro Cultural São Paulo (2012). Selected group shows include Estalo – 14ª Bienal do Mercosul, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2025); 15th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2024); Abrasive Paradise, KUNSTHAL KAdE, Amersfoort, Netherlands (2022); Coleção Andrea e José Olympio Pereira, Centro Cultural do Banco do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2021); Casa Carioca, Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil (2020); Estação Pinacoteca, São Paulo, Brazil (2018) and Caixa Cultural, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2017).
Her work is found in international collections including The Dallas Museum of Art, Texas, USA; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Pinault Collection, Paris, France; Instituto Inhotim, Brumadinho, Brazil; MAM – Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Museu Serralves,Porto, Portugal; Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; Taguchi Art Collection, Tokyo, Japan; The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Florida, USA; The Rubell Family Collection, Miami, USA.
