Nara Roesler Gallery

About the Gallery
Galeria 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 2015 it opened in New York City, continuing its mission to provide the best platform for its artists to show their work.

About the Presentation
Nara Roesler will present work by Amelia Toledo in a solo presentation at Independent 20th Century. Amelia Toledo (b. 1926, São Paulo, Brazil–d.2017, Cotia, Brazil) is a leading figure of Brazilian art in the twentieth century, with a career spanning over five decades, marked by distinctive engagements with constructive sculptural experimentations, subsequently unfolding in her iconic entwinements between art and nature. In the mid-1970s, Amélia Toledo developed a body of work that marked a decisive moment in her practice, presented in the exhibition Emergências at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro in 1975. In this series, the artist turned her attention to the human body not as a figurative whole, but as a set of fragments, impressions, and traces. Hands, mouths, ears, feet, and bodily molds appear isolated or multiplied, emerging from surfaces or occupying space as sculptural presences. These forms suggest both appearance and interruption, visibility and restraint, reinforcing the tension between what is revealed and what remains contained. Produced in synthetic materials such as resin and industrial compounds, these works reflect Toledo’s growing interest in material experimentation and in processes of casting and molding. The body is understood less as representation and more as evidence — a physical index of presence. Alongside the sculptures, Toledo created works on newspaper pages, partially obscuring printed news with bodily marks, gestures, and animal tracks. This act of covering or interfering with information subtly echoes the climate of censorship and repression in Brazil during the military dictatorship, transforming everyday media into a site of visual and political intervention. Rather than adopting overt political imagery, Toledo’s approach is quiet, precise, and materially grounded. The body appears as a site of resistance and vulnerability, caught between emergence and erasure. This body of work laid the groundwork for many of the artist’s later investigations into nature, matter, and perception, while firmly situating her practice within the critical experimental art of the 1970s in Brazil.