Nara Roesler

About the Presentation
Nara Roesler will present work by Amelia Toledo in a solo presentation at Independent 20th Century. Toledo (1926-2017) was the grande dame of the ecological abstraction in Brasil. While her contemporaries approached the complexity of collective bodies and corporeal psyche (Lygia Pape, Lygia Clark); the soulful and transcendent body of language (Mira Schendel), and cosmic figural imagination (Tomie Ohtake), Toledo unwaveringly focused on the body of the earth, on nature as body and source of unintentional beauty.

Amelia Toledo experimented with materials, focusing on the hybrid nature of art objects and non-addressed beauty of natural beings. Rather than imitating the aspect of nature, Toledo focused on natural processes and operations, reproducing their agency and temporality in her works.

Early-on in her career, Amelia produced watercolors that echo sediment processes in nature. These works anticipated her interest in the inherent opacity of transparent bodies, which led her to experiment with plastic and resin in the late 1960's. 

Representation beyond and before mimesis was a permanent object of inquiry for Amelia Toledo. Therefore, her interest in reflecting surfaces capable of producing anamorphisms and deformation, her ceaseless mimicking of nature's power of metamorphosis and her fascination for body casting, indexes and marks, the resonant beauty of slowness in natural processes as showed in fossils and crystals.

But Amelia Toledo was never indifferent to her own time and the politics involved in her approach to art. As such in the 1970's, while Brazil was subjected to repression and authoritarianism, Amelia explicitly responded to the constraints against free expression in her series Emergencies. It was a way to define dictators as predators, embodying them in the tiger's traces over newspapers.

Late in her life, around the 1980's, her fascination for tracing and marks constituted the essential grammar of her approach to painting trough repetitive marking over rough materials, summarizing both the opacity of art and the transparency of beauty.

About the Gallery
Nara Roesler is a leading Brazilian contemporary art gallery, representing seminal Brazilian and international artists who emerged in the 1950s as well as preeminent mid-career and emerging artists who dialogue with the currents put forth by these historical figures. Founded by Nara Roesler in 1989, the gallery has consistently fomented curatorial practice while upholding the utmost quality in art production. This has actively been put into practice through a select and rigorous exhibitions program created in close collaboration with its artists; the implementation and fostering of the Roesler Hotel program, a platform for curatorial projects; and continued support to artists beyond the gallery space, working with institutions and curators in offsite shows. In 2012, the gallery doubled its São Paulo exhibition space, in 2014 it expanded to Rio, and in 2016 it opened in New York City, continuing its mission to provide the best platform for its artists to show their work.