Regina Silveira
Regina Silveira’s artistic path is intertwined with the history of Brazilian contemporary art. Since the late 1950s, the artist has been a leading figure in the evolution of artistic research, pioneering the development of new forms of representing and composing the image. Known for her research into the norms of visuality, such as the principles of perspective, three-dimensionality, and the study of shadows, the artist works in various media, including printmaking, video and sculpture, as well as large public installations and site-specific works.
It was in the early 1970s, while living and working in Puerto Rico, that Regina Silveira began her first investigations concerning geometry and perspective. In the historic series of silkscreen prints Middle Class &Co, the artist appropriated photographic images for the first time, taking them (in this case) from magazines and newspapers and replicating them in various claustrophobic situations, where the crowd in the photo finds itself enclosed in geometric receptacles. This group of works arose as a criticism of the massification of the social reality of that time – a critique which, amazingly, also resonates with our current reality.
Since the mid-2000s, Regina Silveira has been using the hand as a sign in her research. Thus, cutouts depicting hands and gestures have taken on different meanings in the artist’s work, many of which refer to art itself. The Broken series is an extension of this research, where she uses digital printing on laminated paper, two supports that she has been recently investigating.