Inverno Dentro do Bosque
Luciana Brito Galeria presents Inverno Dentro do Bosque [Winter in the Grove], a group exhibition curated by Fernando Mota. Continuing the Tetralogia das Estações – a cycle of four exhibitions held every four years between 2022 and 2034 – this show follows Fauna, Flora e Primavera (2022) and takes as its point of departure two Japanese short stories: “Rashōmon” (1915) and “In a Grove” (1922), by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. Moving through shadows, ambiguities, and multiple versions of truth, Akutagawa’s narratives provide the framework for this meditation on winter.
Artists: Afonso Tostes, Caio Reisewitz, Eder Santos, Fernando Zarif, Liliana Porter, Junia Penido, Marina Abramovic, Marina Woisky, Mika Takahashi, Paula Garcia, Regina Silveira, Selva de Carvalho, Raphael Zarka, Sofia Borges, Thiago Honório, Thomaz Farkas, Tobias Putrih, Wagner Malta Tavares.
Inverno Dentro do Bosque
Curated by Fernando Mota
Opening: July 4, starting at 11 a.m.
On view through August 8
In “Rashōmon,” Akutagawa uses a setting of decay and ruin to explore the limits of ethics and survival, transforming the gate that gives the story its name into a symbol of a society in disintegration. In the story “In a Grove,” by contrast, he turns to the instability of truth, reconstructing a murder through irreconcilable testimonies in which each account reveals not only the facts but also the narrator’s interests and perspective. Both stories served as the basis for Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), a landmark of world cinema and an enduring touchstone for reflections on memory, perception, and the multiplicity of perspectives.
Within this context, Inverno Dentro do Bosque stems from Fernando Mota’s intention to bring Akutagawa’s narrative logic into the exhibition space. The question driving the project was how a literary technique built on the coexistence of multiple perspectives could be incorporated into the visitor’s experience. To approach this question, the curator used the exhibition design as the project’s main conceptual device. Within this approach, the architecture of the former modernist residence that houses the gallery operates as a field of possibilities, where different paths through the space lead to equally valid interpretations. Mota created two mirrored exhibition paths, structured around pairs of similar works by each participating artist. Through repetitions, detours, and small dissonances, the exhibition constructs an experience of uncertainty and estrangement, evoking the ambiguous atmosphere of Akutagawa’s stories.
In dialogue with the gardens designed by Roberto Burle Marx, the exhibition presents casa lamento I and II (2026), two site-specific installations by Selva de Carvalho, positioned facing each other. Having also taken part in Fauna, Flora e Primavera (2022), the artist occupies a singular place within the Tetralogia das Estações, as her practice is followed across the sixteen-year span of the project. This partnership among artist, curator, and gallery reflects a commitment to building knowledge over time, through shared experimentation and conceptual evolution. Composed of large fabric cocoons suspended in space, the installation revisits and transforms elements of the work shown in the first exhibition, when its forms resembled a centipede. Suggesting states of waiting, transition, and metamorphosis, the works convert the garden into a territory of transformation, mystery, and uncertainty – much like Akutagawa’s grove.
The exhibition also features a group of works by Serbian artist Marina Abramović, whose practice investigates states of transition between exterior and interior, action and contemplation, physical presence and mental experience. Highlights include works from the Transitory Objects for Human Use series (2015), including Chair for Human Use II and Chair for Human Use III. Conceived to be activated by visitors, these works move beyond sculpture to function as devices for perception, inviting viewers to experience heightened states of attention, presence, and awareness.
Distributed throughout the gallery spaces, photographs by Caio Reisewitz and Thomaz Farkas bring together two artists from different generations who share an interest in landscape as a visual and cultural construction. In their work, territory ceases to be a mere backdrop and becomes a field of projections, reflections, memories, and narratives, showing that every act of looking involves a choice and, with it, a particular way of constructing reality.
Altogether, the exhibition presents approximately sixty works by artists invited and represented by Luciana Brito Galeria. Like Akutagawa’s characters, the works gathered in Inverno Dentro do Bosque invite visitors to follow different paths and arrive at their own interpretations. Rather than proposing answers, the exhibition inhabits the fertile territory of doubt and imagination, where multiple narratives coexist, opening up possibilities to which every truth must yield.
