Nara Roesler is pleased to announce ‘Amelia Toledo: 1958-2007’, the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States, at the gallery’s new location in Chelsea, New York, from February 25 to April 17, 2021.
Amelia Toledo (1926-2017) is a prominent figure in 20th-century Brazilian art, with a career spanning over five decades. Toledo was introduced to the field of visual arts in the late 1930s when she began attending the studio of the iconic Brazilian modernist artist Anita Malfatti, after which she studied with Yoshiya Takaoka and Waldemar da Costa.
Throughout her career, Toledo employed various media and techniques, including painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, installations, and jewelry design, always focusing on the use of materials and texture. Her work initially aligned with constructivist research, echoing notions of Neoconcretism and the characteristic concerns of the 1960s, with an interest in public participation as well as the intertwining of art and life. She developed her multifaceted work in a permanent and mutually enriching dialogue with other artists of her generation, including Mira Schendel, whose iconic career was marked by interweavings of art and nature; a selection of Toledo’s works will be exhibited for the first time in the United States at Nara Roesler’s new gallery in Chelsea, New York. Press release Amelia Toledo Tomie Ohtake, Hélio Oiticica, and Lygia Pape.
Ultimately, Toledo’s signature achievements are driven by her focus on nature, which implies her investigations into the concept of landscape, involving stones and shells, among other natural elements, which she compulsively collected and incorporated into her work. Challenged by these materials, Amelia Toledo pursued her career both as an artist and as an engineer.
In works like Path of Colors from the Dark (2001), for example, the artist uses stones to investigate color, shine, transparency, and the various forms of the Earth’s “flesh.” She managed to create compositions in which pieces collected from the dark depths of natural environments are arranged in various layouts, including dialogues with “modern” materials, such as stainless steel. The rocks were not subjected to any treatment that altered their original shape, but only polished to reveal their internal patterns, exposing their temporality.
Another central pillar of Toledo’s work is color, an interest that is notably manifested in her paintings, among other works.
Paintings from the Horizons series will be on display at Nara Roesler – New York, along with Fields of Color, a series that the artist began in the 1980s and continued until shortly before her death in 2017.
Also from her early works, the exhibition presents some of the collages that Amelia Toledo started in 1958 while living in London. Amelia Toledo allowed herself the freedom to never be part of a group and to experiment according to her own moment.
In the artist’s words: “It is not just about different processes; each material builds itself, proposes itself in the form of certain consequences.” Her production resonates today more than ever through her continuous articulation between aesthetics and nature, ecology and form, emphasizing both the sophistication of design and the roughness of matter/materials.