Galatea

About the Presentation
Galatea will present works from the 1960s to the 1980s by the self-taught Brazilian artist Miguel dos Santos (b. 1944). Ranging between ceramics, sculpture in marble and wood, and painting, Dos Santos’s practice is deeply informed by the popular culture of northeastern Brazil, where he was born and lives today. He was part of the 1970s Armorial movement initiated by the writer Ariano Suassuna, which proposed a return to the diverse historic roots of the region’s culture. Dos Santos’s oeuvre enfolds influences from traditional Indigenous and African art and spirituality together with modernist movements such as Cubism and Surrealism. His unique magical realism finds its expression in fantastical hybrid figures and creatures that populate his two- and three-dimensional works. This will be the artist’s debut solo show in the United States.

About the Gallery
Galatea is a gallery that emerges from the different and complementary trajectories and backgrounds of its founding partners: Antonia Bergamin worked for almost a decade as a managing partner of a major gallery in São Paulo; Conrado Mesquita is an art dealer and collector whose specialty is discovering great works in unlikely places; and Tomás Toledo is a curator who actively contributed to the historic institutional renovation of MASP, from which he recently left as chief curator.

With modern and contemporary Brazilian art as its main focus, Galatea works with and sells both well-known names from the national art scene and new talents in contemporary art, while also revisiting historical artists. Such temporal amplitude reflects and articulates the conceptual basis of the gallery’s program: to be a point of support and convergence between different cultures, temporalities, styles, and genres, provoking powerful frictions between the old and the new, the canonical and the non-canonical, the erudite and the informal.