Carmela Gross

San Pablo, Brasil, 1946

            Carmela Gross is part of a generation of artists who began their careers during the Brazilian military dictatorship—A generation characterized by formal experimentation, collective action and the attempt to reconfigure the dynamics between artistic production and everyday life. During this period, discussions about new forms of artistic production, the approximation of art to life and the visual appropriation of elements of mass culture inaugurated an agenda. Her career as a visual artist and teacher spans five decades in which she consolidated herself as a multimedia artist, although she always prioritized drawing as a starting point and the urban space as the core of reflection, expressing a permanent concern for the dialectical relationship between the work and the space, the work and the public. 

            Her early works were influenced by pop art and the visual vocabulary of children, as can be seen in the sculpture Nuvens of 1967. During the following decade, her production focused on two-dimensional representations: drawings, photocopies, mail art and stamps; the Carimbos series is from this period (1978). In the 1980s, Gross created paintings and video works, although she never abandoned drawing. From the mid-1990s onwards, issues related to architecture and urban landscape became more relevant in her production. An example of this quest is the installation Buracos, in which Gross dug holes in the floor of an old municipal slaughterhouse in São Paulo as part of the exhibition Arte cidade. In the 2000s, the artist's work began to activate new spatial relationships with the inclusion of light, as in Aurora (2003) and Escadas (2013). Observing her process, we witness a work marked by formal diversity and the use of various supports and elements: fluorescent light tubes, fabrics, concrete, metal, wood, graphite, and paper. 

            Her work is crossed by the variegated and stimulating visual language of the big cities. Thus, in the Islas series, the artist marks an autonomous territory within the exhibition space through the tension and elasticity of the material. Gross achieves an inventory that becomes a political position, the voice of many, a denunciation and a fight. The set of operations involved in the stages of creation of her work, from its conception as a project (almost always in the form of a drawing) to its final arrangement in space, point to a dialogue between the piece (its materiality, the construction process) and the site-specific subtexts (its history, its sociocultural dynamics), and emphasize the active role of the viewer. What is a city made of? Gross offers an answer: of layers, of moments in history, of material and immaterial stimuli, of light and shadow.