From February 10 to 12, Gomide & Co is part of Art Basel Viewing Rooms 'OVR:2021' with a selection of Maria Lira Marques' works made throughout 2021.
Maria Lira Marques (b. 1946) is part of a long line of artists from Vale do Jequitinhonha, Minas Gerais (Brazil), among whom are Isabel Mendes da Cunha, Noemisa Batista dos Santos, and Ulisses Pereira Chaves. Like many of these potters, she began in the visual arts working with the utilitarian handicrafts for which the region is known. However, since she did not consider herself skilled enough for traditional pottery, she began to develop her own experimental creations, seeking inspiration from the roots of popular culture. In the 1970s, Maria Lira began exhibiting her ceramic works, such as busts, nativity scenes, and anthropomorphic masks, evocative of her African and indigenous heritage.
Since the 1990s, she has dedicated herself to the body of work for which she is best known, Bichos do Sertão, paintings of imaginary animals that make up a vast bestiary, characterized by the integration of her graphic language with the landscape of the 'sertão'. These works are drawn with a mixture of clay and glue on river stones, using a chromatic palette of earthy and organic textures, resulting in pictorial surfaces of strong visual impact.
For Lira, "African art seems to be that of people fighting: it's all swords, arrows... and when I look at other [European] art, everyone is sitting there, it seems that there is more of that tranquility. The other [African] art seems to move us more. Another work from this early stage is Me ajude a levantar (n.d.), which according to the artist, narrates the marginalization she encountered while building her artistic career; it appeals at the same time for solidarity among the people and for them not to give up their struggles. This was also the title given to the book published in 1983, with a long testimony of Lira, which is a key piece to understand her journey.
To paraphrase the artist, it is essential to continue the struggle so that these efforts go beyond a momentary perspective, understanding them as the beginning of a broader process that takes decades to complete, depositing very deep-rooted colonial structures.
