Precious Adesina is a London-based arts and culture journalist. Her work has appeared in a host of publications including The New York Times, BBC Culture, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Art Newspaper, Kinfolk, i-D, and more.
Both artists’ works have an intensely vibrant and immersive quality that draws viewers in, the gallerist Hena Lee says. Image: Miguel Rio Branco, Exuzinho Looking Forward, 1991/2017, Fuji crystal archive print, 32 x 32 x 2 in. Courtesy of Almeida & Dale.
At first glance, Miguel Rio Branco’s Exuzinho Looking Forward (1991/2017) and Chakaia Booker’s Nomadic Dwelling (2003) seem worlds apart. In Rio Branco’s photograph, a young boy hangs on the ropes of a boxing ring, staring directly into the camera. Behind him, red paint bleeds across the wall, almost like wings—a detail David Levi Strauss once described in Artforum as transforming the child into “a bloody angel”. In contrast, Booker’s sculpture stands at over ten feet tall with strategically cut and layered tires climbing a steel frame like wisteria against a garden wall. Yet the pair's work will be shown in a joint exhibition by Almeida & Dale and David Nolan Gallery at the 2026 edition of Independent.
When Valentina Branchini, a partner at David Nolan Gallery, saw one of Rio Branco's photographs while at a collector's house in São Paulo, she knew she needed to showcase his work alongside Booker’s. “Among the many sculptures, paintings and very few photographs the collector had, I saw a photo by Miguel Rio Branco of a boxer from the back,” Branchini says. “It was almost an immediate thought to create this very powerful dialogue between these two major masters in their own unique medium.” While the artists' works differ aesthetically, “both engage, in one way or another, in revealing the social and political charge embedded in overlooked spaces and materialities”, adds Hena Lee, a director at Almeida & Dale.
The sculptural quality of this photograph by Rio Branco made gallerist Valentina Branchini think immediately of Booker’s work. Image: Miguel Rio Branco, Back, 1991/2017, Fuji crystal archive print, 32 x 32 x 2 in. Courtesy of Almeida & Dale.
For both artists, their adopted hometowns—Rio de Janeiro for Rio Branco and New York for Booker—play an integral role in the direction their work has taken. Starting as a painter at the age of 14, Rio Branco, now 79, added photography to his practice in his early 20s, which he says he saw as a means “to know more about this crazy world we live in”. The son of a diplomat and born in Gran Canaria, he grew up living between Brazil, and a host of other countries, including America, Spain, Portugal and Switzerland. The time Rio Branco spent in New York, after living in Switzerland, was a particularly important period in his painting and marked the beginning of his work in photography. When the former member of the revered New York-based photographic co-operative Magnum Photos returned to Brazil in 1972, he noticed a stark contrast between people of different socioeconomic backgrounds. “I began to see another reality—the reality of a country with a lot of contrast,” he says. This led him to create works that have now been shown at institutions worldwide, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Exuzinho Looking Forward is part of a series of photographs taken in the 1990s at Santa Rosa Boxing Academy in Rio de Janeiro, a boxing club frequented by former prostitutes, street kids, and other disenfranchised groups. “Boxing offered not only physical discipline but also a sense of belonging and mutual support,” Lee says. These photographs move away from depicting personal struggle, instead finding beauty and dignity in their activities. “The focus on the textures of the fighters’ skin, the chromatic compositions of the environment, and the boxers’ bodily movements creates a cinematic portrait of the club’s atmosphere.”
Both Rio Branco’s subject matter and Booker’s choice of material reference exploited and overlooked minorities. Image: Chakaia Booker, The Host, 2023, rubber tires, wood, and steel, 33 x 32 x 35 in. Courtesy of David Nolan Gallery.
For Booker, 73, sculptures made of recycled black rubber tires have been a mainstay of her practice since the 1990s, and can be found in a number of permanent collections, including at the Met and the Studio Museum in Harlem. According to the artist, abandoned tires were “abundant in the East Village in the 80s and 90s” and “quickly revealed their limitless potential”. She found them “resilient, durable, and strong”, she says. “I wanted to work at a larger scale, and rubber tires as a material could handle scaling up.”
Though Booker’s work is often attached to global issues, the interpretation of them, she says, depends on the observer. “Many cite my work as discussing environmentalism, capitalism, sexism, racism, and just about every other 'ism' you can think of, and it does and does not all at once,” she says. “My work, in many ways, is a reflection of the viewer, of the world we live in. Its interpretation and meaning change as we change.” The climate crisis and social class are the two topics that people most commonly see Booker’s works as critiquing. A 2022 study, for example, found that tire wear produces almost 2,000 times more pollution than car exhausts. “The car is a class status symbol and has been since the beginning,” Branchini adds. “And rubber is a material that historically has exploited minorities and the poor strata of the population in the different countries where it was collected.”
Experimentation has been central to both artists’ careers, with Booker exploring freer and more playful compositions and Rio Branco moving away from portraiture towards abstraction. Image: Miguel Rio Branco, Yellow shoes thinking of Max Ernst, 2007/2014, inkjet print on Hahnemühle, photo Gloss Baryta 315g paper, 43 1/2 x 61 in. Courtesy of Almeida & Dale.
Booker and Rio Branco both explore the multiplicity of their media, tirelessly finding new ways to adapt and grow their practices. “Rio Branco’s photography doesn’t hide the history of the objects, people, and places he photographs, much like the materials that I use,” Booker says. Rio Branco’s series of boxing photos was a defining moment, as it marked his last project with people as the central focus. “The interesting thing for me was that the bodies were not completely visible,” he says. Often in the images for the series, his subjects are moving, or fragments of their body are on view in a manner he describes as “more like a sculpture”.
But his growing discomfort with photographing individuals led him in a new direction, and he began to focus more on what he describes as “traces of the people”. “Time became a really important thing: the marks of the time, times on the walls,” he says, explaining that his photographs “became more symbolic and abstract.” This is clear in many of his works showing at Independent such as Blue Klein (1992/2020), which shows peeling paint against a dilapidated wall. Yellow shoes thinking of Max Ernst (2007/2014) shows the legs of a woman in mustard shoes layered on top of the inside of a mollusk, inspired by his experiences in—and feelings about—Japan.
According to Booker, she and Rio Branco share a love of pattern and both strive for a sense of honesty and assuredness in their works. Image: Chakaia Booker, Strayed, 2019, rubber tires and wood, 64 x 62 x 60 in. Courtesy of David Nolan Gallery.
Chakaia Booker, Strayed (detail), 2019, rubber tires and wood, 64 x 62 x 60 in. Courtesy of David Nolan Gallery.
Chakaia Booker, Strayed (detail), 2019, rubber tires and wood, 64 x 62 x 60 in. Courtesy of David Nolan Gallery.
Booker has experimented extensively with the way in which she approaches her use of tires. In Strayed (2019), for example, strands of rubber move more freely away from the structure, which Branchini believes showcases a more “playful” approach to her craft compared to the other works on view at Independent. “Loops at the top of the sculpture are echoed at the feet of it, making this a beautiful and unusual composition that expands to two spatial dimensions,” she says. And Booker notes that pushing the boundaries of a material in this way is crucial. “I think any artist would tell you that the most challenging aspect of making their work is the limits of their own imagination,” she says. “The rubber is a raw material; it will always be there for me so long as I am willing to see its potential.”
The two artists can see the parallels between their works. “There is a history of wear in the treads and tubes I use that is as much a part of the work as the composition and assemblage,” Booker says. “Rio Branco has a definite love of pattern I respond to, and there is a sense of assuredness in his subjects and an honesty in his work that I certainly strive for in mine,” she adds. Rio Branco notes that his “oldest pictures work almost in parallel” with Booker’s tires. Lee concludes that there is also a similarity in the way both create striking visual events:. “Their works share an intensely vibrant and immersive quality, drawing us in.”
Precious Adesina is a London-based arts and culture journalist. Her work has appeared in a host of publications including The New York Times, BBC Culture, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Art Newspaper, Kinfolk, i-D, and more.