On the occasion of Art Basel Miami Beach 2025, Gomide&Co will present a Kabinett dedicated to the work of Glauco Rodrigues (1929–2004), one of the most incisive visual chroniclers of Brazilian culture.
The selection focuses on works created between the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period in which the artist critically engaged with national symbols, official historical narratives, and the imagery of mass culture. The project takes as its point of departure Acontece que somos canibais (“It Happens That We Are Cannibals”), an essay by anthropologist and curator Lilia Moritz Schwarcz written for the eponymous exhibition held by the gallery in 2021, which identifies in Rodrigues’s practice the creation of a “visual history of Brazil” marked by humor, ambiguity, and social critique. His paintings from this period feature white grounds overlaid with Indigenous figures, tropical fruits, sharp phrases, and popular characters—composing a universe that is at once festive and steeped in irony, satire, and critical reflection.
A self-taught artist, Rodrigues began his career in the printmaking clubs of Bagé (his hometown) and Porto Alegre, developing over the decades a body of work that traverses the late modernist period. In his Brazilianist and anthropophagic phase, he appropriated the fluorescent palette of advertising and the language of graphic reproduction to deconstruct—rather than celebrate—its symbols. This is evident in works such as Menino Txucarramãe (1974), Pau-Brasil (Iboty-îaba, o desabrochar da flor I) (1975), A República Velha (from the series Aquarela do Brasil, 1977), and Os Caxinauás famintos estão (from the series A lenda do Coatipuru, 1977), in which Rodrigues reimagines national icons and canonical narratives through irreverence and critique.
Updating the anthropophagic gesture of Tarsila do Amaral and the modernists, he “devours” symbols and stories to reveal a Brazil that is contradictory, plural, and impure. In a time when national emblems have once again been appropriated by conservative rhetoric, his work reasserts the power of art to expose—with humor and lucidity—the contradictions of the Brazilian collective imagination.
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