Artista Visitante - Marcia Grostein: Pull/Pulso

Luciana Brito Galeria is pleased to present Marcia Grostein – Pull/Pulso, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Brazil since 1995, as part of its Visiting Artist program. Based in New York since 1979, Marcia Grostein is showing for the first time a group of works that reveal the experimental character of her practice and her ongoing exploration of the relationships among materials, supports, and different artistic languages. The exhibition also features large-scale paintings in which gesture, chromatic intensity, and the dialogue between figuration and abstraction interweave in compositions with a strong spatial presence. The exhibition came about through collaboration with Kreëmart.

Since the 1970s, Marcia Grostein has worked in a range of artistic languages and fields of inquiry, developing her practice through experimentation and a sustained interest in the body, movement, space, and matter. While Pull suggests force, attraction, and magnetism, Pulso (Portuguese for “pulse”) evokes the body, rhythm, and life. Together, the two terms – one English, one Portuguese – capture fundamental aspects of her artistic trajectory and offer insight into her approach to painting and sculpture as expanded, permeable fields in constant transformation.

The relationship between painting and sculpture is important for understanding the work of Marcia Grostein, whose artistic practice has consistently incorporated movement and choreography. Her sculptures engage with their environment, retaining something of the gesture, sinuous lines, and chromatic energy that characterize her painting and carrying these elements over into three dimensions. In the exhibition, this relationship plays out in the larger sculptures set directly on the floor, such as She (1993); in smaller wall-mounted pieces, such as METAL _ MORFOSE (2024); and in the functional sculptures (lamps) made from a resin specially developed by the artist. Across different scales and supports, these works reveal an artistic practice that transforms matter into forms that expand through space.

In Grostein’s work, the pictorial image frequently breaks free of the canvas, taking shape as objects and sculptures and forging relationships not only among materials and forms but also between the artwork and the body. Building on her Mineral Tongues research (2021), the Threshold series (2026) features small paintings with objects that attach magnetically and can be removed, handled, and transferred to the body. Here, the magnets serve more than a technical purpose: they create a system of attraction, movement, and balance in which part of a painting can come away, move onto the body, and later return to the artwork. Painting thus becomes more than a surface for contemplation, embracing touch and manipulation as essential dimensions of the experience.

Marcia Grostein’s career unfolded in close dialogue with the vibrant New York art scene of the 1970s. She held her first exhibition in the city in 1978, with an introductory text by Willem de Kooning. In that milieu, she forged relationships with other prominent figures in international art, including James Rosenquist and Joseph Beuys. In 1980, she joined the roster of artists at the Betty Parsons Gallery, and in 1983 presented Homage to Betty Parsons: Marcia Grostein and Jackson Pollock, bringing her work into dialogue with Pollock’s abstract expressionism and strengthening her presence in the art scene of the time.

Grostein’s trajectory, however, extends beyond these relationships and any particular affiliation with the American art tradition. From the outset of her career, she has moved freely among media, exploring a wide range of formal, material, and conceptual possibilities. Dance, painting, sculpture, photography, video, performance, installation, and public art – including the Sky Drawings series (1999–2000), in which drawing turns the open sky into part of the artwork – all form part of a multidisciplinary path in which Grostein continually explores the relationships among gesture, matter, body, and space. This movement among artistic languages is more than a characteristic of her work; it is a way of thinking about artistic experience itself.