Regina Silveira: Coisas

For the first time in her career, the works in porcelain and glass realized by the artist during the last couple of decades are presented alongside each other.

Luciana Brito Galeria is pleased to announce Regina Silveira’s solo show, Coisas [Things]. Opening on November 9 (when the Art Weekend also takes place), the exhibit gathers, for the first time, a panorama of the artist’s production in porcelain, a medium with which she has been working for decades, in parallel to her renowned installations and exhibitions. It also includes a new vinyl installation at the façade of the gallery’s Annex space.

Things gathers more than 30 works by Regina Silveira produced between the 1990s and 2018. They are created from domestic objects in glass and porcelain appropriated by the artist, who creates interferences on them, thus shifting their meaning. These works (that are all unique pieces) are understood by Silveira as a transformation of banal, everyday objects, which are removed from the universe of use and experience with her interventions. For her, her work with tiles and the whole set of work in porcelain and glass are included in her encompassing way of using diverse media. Appropriating an everyday object and altering its meaning also is a regular operation in her poetics.

These works are part of the artist’s research for decades, and Silveira sees in them the same interest as when working with prints, assigning to each one of them their own theme, connection and purpose. Some of these pieces were presented at institutional exhibitions, in the wider context of their project or series. It is the case, for example, of the objects in porcelain with overglaze enamels from the series Crash – plates, soup bowls, jars and vases that appear to look like as they had been gunshot –, from her homonymous exhibition at the Museu Oscar Niemeyer – MON, Curitiba (Brazil), in 2015. Another example present in Things is the work Matar a sede, from 2017, created after the invitation to participate in the exhibition Yoko Ono: O céu ainda é azul, você sabe… [Yoko Ono: The sky is still blue, you know…], realized at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake, where Silveira exhibited a crystal jar on which all capital sins were written.

Since the 1960s, Regina Silveira – who will have a major retrospective at MAC USP in 2020 – develops a research that is averse to simple cataloging, and this exhibition is no different. With her conceptual point of view, Silveira understand techniques as means instead of ends, and conciliates a rational desire of apprehending reality via the classic systems of representation with a surrealist impulse by which she questions and creates strangeness within these same systems. ­­­Now, in Things, her works in porcelain and glass gain an additional layer of meaning not only from being grouped together, but also from being exhibited at the Modern residence that houses Luciana Brito Galeria – a project by architect Rino Levi that was also originally conceived for domestic use, and that was transformed in exhibition space.