MEXICO CITY.- The Secretaría de Cultura, through the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes and the Museo Nacional de Arte, in collaboration with the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA), present the exhibition “Antropofagia y Modernidad. Arte Brasileño en la Colección Fadel (1908- 1981).” (Antropophagy and Modernity. Brazilian Art in the Fadel Collection (1908-1981) with a large selection of works which come from the Collection Heclida y Sérgio Fadel, one of the most complete and important collections of Brazilian art ranging from the end of the XIX century to the present.

The collection has a patrimony of more than 3000 pieces that address the history of art in Brazil and its relationship with the modern and contemporary international scene. Thanks to the generosity of the Fadel family, the pieces of the collection have been exhibited in important museums around the world.

Victoria Giraudo (Curatorship Executive Coordinator of the MALBA) is in charge of the curatorship which has a selection of more than 150 pieces that represent the different modern movements bound to the cultural and artistic construction of Brazil, up to the beginnings of contemporary art. This is the first time that such an important selection from the Colección Hecilda y Sérgio Fadel is being displayed in Mexico.

Victoria Giraudo mentions that this exhibition “is about an international gaze, that is to say, from outside Brazil, from a neighbor country that shares many cultural heritage, sociological, political and commercial singularities with it, but that is at the same time completely different in its geography, history, people and language. To have a better knowledge and comprehension of its culture it’s necessary to better know the country, which seems to include many countries and diverse communities.”

The exhibition, which includes painting, sculpture, graphic, drawing and installation, is chronologically articulated in 3 modules, which are also subdivided in different subjects: the first module begins with the first modernism in Brazil (until the thirties decade); the second one explores the autochthonous roots and international modernization (forties and fifties decade); and the last one, reviews the modern rupture including some experiences towards the contemporary (from the sixties decade forward).

Among the precursors of modernism we find characters like Castagneto Visconti, and the first abstract pieces of Belmiro de Almeida. Modernity is represented with pieces from Vicente do Rego Monteiro, Anita Malfatti, Tarsila do Amaral, Lasar Segall, Cícero Dias, Cándido Portinari, Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, and Ismael Ney; joined by expresionst engravings of Goeldi, Art Decó influences of Antonio Gomide, pieces of John Graz, and nativist spirit sculptures of Victor Brecheret and Maria Martins.

The Museo Nacional de Arte received in 1994 a major donation from Maria Asúnsolo that includes a portrait of the muse made by the Brazilian painter Emiliano Di Cavalcanti. This piece had not been shown until the exhibit Los modernos. This time the museum offers an exhibition dedicated to assessing the relevance of Brazilian art in the creation of modern languages in the last century. As modern art occurred simultaneously in different geographies, it is pertinent to present not only the perspective of Mexico and Europe, but also the context in this part of South America.

The exhibition also includes representative pieces of geometric abstraction, concretism and neoconcretistm pieces of artists such as Waldemar Cordeiro, Lothar Charoux, Anatol Wladislaw, Lygia Pape, Hélio Oiticica, and Lygia Clark.

From the second generation of the sixties and seventies there are pieces from artists such as Mira Schendel, Sergio Camargo, Waltércio Caldas, and Wanda Pimentel, which reflect the big sociopolitical transformations that happened in Brazil.