Teresinha Soares: um alegre teatro sério opens on Wednesday, May 24 from 6 to 10 p.m. at Gomide&Co. Organized by Luisa Duarte, the exhibition presents a collection of works including drawings, paintings and engravings from the artist's intense career throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The exhibition also includes previously unpublished texts by Lilia Schwarcz and Julia de Souza.
Within the repressive context of the Brazilian military dictatorship, the artist dared to represent feminist and gender themes, through a vein of the erotic and strongly contesting the relationship of the body with moral values, consumption and the political machine.
"My art is realistic precisely because I condemn the false values of a society to which I belong. Realistic and erotic, my art is like the cross for the devil" – Teresinha Soares
The audacious aspect is both in the theme and in the formal treatment employed by the artist, with strokes and colours that transit and relate to the artistic movements of the time, such as pop art, noveau réalisme and the new Brazilian objectivity.
"In Um Alegre Teatro Sério, the work that gives title to the exhibition, the female body appears doubled – sometimes more curved and perhaps repressed and at other times more expansive and freer. Phrases such as “with the lights off”, which appears underneath a luminous lampshade, or “there are others, naturally”, and “receives even in bed. And the ruled one”, coexist with faces kissing each other and something that looks like a theater mask. The work evokes the theater of women’s corporeality, subjected to so many prohibitions, simulations and silences. It also introduces the artist’s eroticized imagery conjuring an effective summary that performs within and without the canvas" – excerpt from a text by Lilia Schwarcz for the exhibition
Before becoming an artist, Soares was the first woman councillor elected in her home town of Araxá, where she was also a miss and a teacher. As well as being an artist, she is also a writer and an activist for women's rights and the environment.
In recent years, her work has been reviewed and reinscribed in the history of Brazilian art, having participated in important group exhibitions, such as "The World Goes Pop", at Tate Modern (2015), "Radical Women: Latin American Art", 1960-1985, at the Hammer Museum (2017), Brooklyn Museum (2018), and at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (2018). In 2017, MASP held her first retrospective exhibition in 40 years: "Quem tem medo de Teresinha Soares?"
Her feminist and libertarian gaze, her capacity to ally formal eloquence with protestatory energy, provide us with a work of singular relevance for thinking about the paths of art and the political challenges of the present time.
