Tunga
Eu, Você e a Lua [You, Me and the Moon]Installation 09 Aug 23 - 03 Mar 24
Eu, Você e a Lua [Me, You and the Moon] is a work of art by Tunga which has never been exhibited in Brazil, and was one of the last major installations completed by the artist. Tunga started working as an artist in the mid 1960s. Throughout his trajectory, Tunga explored alchemy, psychoanalysis, science and philosophy. He created a unique mythology with symbolic images and materials in which the issue of immutability and transformation is fundamental. The idea that ‘a work is a group of works’ is recurrent in his oeuvre.
Even with a profusion of objects and materials, in Eu, Você e a Lua, each part of it is essentially coherent, forming a whole installation. Some elements reappear in the artist’s poetic vocabulary, such as bottles in crystal, plaster or resin, either hollow or solid. Mirrors, crystals, stones, plates suspended in arcs and rods, as well as chains or leather straps in tripods, appear in other works by Tunga. In juxtaposition with a trunk which has been petrified for millions of years, the use of these materials evokes the organic and the inorganic or the natural and the artificial.
The fossil of a tree trunk which remains intact, suspended in time, coexists with the essence of ember. This wood infused fragrance releases drops, as if an hourglass were marking time passing and the transformation of matter. Resorting to the smell and vision, the original and prehistoric elements in the work by Tunga merge with the contemporary and the ephemeral presence of the fragrance.
Augmented fragments of the human body, patinated bronze thumbs point downward, while rounded silver-plated mirrors like the moon reflect light from above. Finger sculptures, as if duplicated, point to opposite directions, to heaven and to earth. One of them in stone, horizontally aligned with the petrified trunk, shows opposite directions and points to oneself and to the other. The look of the two people can go through the fossil and become one. The two sides have ceased to oppose each other. In Tunga’s poetic reasoning, what is on planet Earth or outside, the internal and external, like ‘me, you and the moon,’ become an indivisible entirety.
Cauê Alves
(chief curator of MAM São Paulo)
Antônio José de Barros Carvalho e Mello Mourão, better known as Tunga, was born in 1952, in Palmares, Pernambuco. He lived and worked in Rio de Janeiro.
He was the first contemporary artist to ever show their work in the Louvre pyramid, besides having participated in exhibitions such as the Venice Biennial in 1982 and the Kassel Documenta in 1992. Today the artist’s work is in collections such as MoMA, in New York; the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston; Centre Pompidou, in Paris; the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Tate Modern, in London.
https://mam.org.br/en/exposicao/me-you-and-the-moon-tunga
Even with a profusion of objects and materials, in Eu, Você e a Lua, each part of it is essentially coherent, forming a whole installation. Some elements reappear in the artist’s poetic vocabulary, such as bottles in crystal, plaster or resin, either hollow or solid. Mirrors, crystals, stones, plates suspended in arcs and rods, as well as chains or leather straps in tripods, appear in other works by Tunga. In juxtaposition with a trunk which has been petrified for millions of years, the use of these materials evokes the organic and the inorganic or the natural and the artificial.
The fossil of a tree trunk which remains intact, suspended in time, coexists with the essence of ember. This wood infused fragrance releases drops, as if an hourglass were marking time passing and the transformation of matter. Resorting to the smell and vision, the original and prehistoric elements in the work by Tunga merge with the contemporary and the ephemeral presence of the fragrance.
Augmented fragments of the human body, patinated bronze thumbs point downward, while rounded silver-plated mirrors like the moon reflect light from above. Finger sculptures, as if duplicated, point to opposite directions, to heaven and to earth. One of them in stone, horizontally aligned with the petrified trunk, shows opposite directions and points to oneself and to the other. The look of the two people can go through the fossil and become one. The two sides have ceased to oppose each other. In Tunga’s poetic reasoning, what is on planet Earth or outside, the internal and external, like ‘me, you and the moon,’ become an indivisible entirety.
Cauê Alves
(chief curator of MAM São Paulo)
Antônio José de Barros Carvalho e Mello Mourão, better known as Tunga, was born in 1952, in Palmares, Pernambuco. He lived and worked in Rio de Janeiro.
He was the first contemporary artist to ever show their work in the Louvre pyramid, besides having participated in exhibitions such as the Venice Biennial in 1982 and the Kassel Documenta in 1992. Today the artist’s work is in collections such as MoMA, in New York; the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston; Centre Pompidou, in Paris; the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Tate Modern, in London.
https://mam.org.br/en/exposicao/me-you-and-the-moon-tunga
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