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RITA DAMASCENO
UR -
In German, the prefix "ur-" indicates primordialness. According to Hesiod’s Greek mythology, Chaos, the most primeval form of divine consciousness, gave origin to the universe, considering that this Greek word originally meant “emptiness,” or the primordial emptiness that drove creation. In this series of drawings, made with acrylic spackling, asphalt, and water-based white pen, Rita Damasceno simulates blackboards marked with chalk, where she presents various sorts of diagrams based on complex monochromatic formulas. Her intricate lines guide us through phrases, abbreviations, figures and equations, dictating the rhythm and orienting our understanding.
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Rita Damasceno’s art reflects her interest in the uneasiness inherent to contemporaneity, along with human thought and its processes of movement and autonomy. The artist resorts to these areas of knowledge as an intellectual support to pose questions informed by her training in philosophy and political science. The exhibition UR presents the essence of Rita Damasceno’s work, where the aesthetics of diagrams are used to organize and convey thought narratives through a combination of image, poetry, text and cognition. Through this dialectic game, her works propose reflective exercises concerning the state of our thought in contemporaneity and its contexts. These exercises are both for herself, as a way of questioning the world, as well as for the viewers, who need to go beyond the barrier of simple appreciation in order to actually assimilate the work. The theoreticians who have most inspired the artist’s thinking include the French thinkers Georges Didi-Huberman and Jacques Derrida, as well as the German Hans-Georg Gadamer, Sybile Krämer, Christian Driesen, Mathias Bauer and Susanne Leeb.
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R I T A D A M A S C E N O“UR-ÉREBO”, 2015
betume, acrílica, giz de cera e caneta branca à base de água sobre tela
bitumen, acrylic, crayons and white water-based pen on canvas
206 x 585 cmView more details
81.1 x 230.31 in -
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Filmagem e Finalização: Matheus Marchetti e João Paulo Belentani (@cinereviva)
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Rita Damasceno
1957, Salvador, Brazil. Lives and works in São Paulo, BrazilRita Damasceno began her career as an artist in the early 1980s when she was living in Germany, where she resided for thirty years. She began by working with drawing, painting and sculpture. Her university training in philosophy and political science provides the intellectual basis for her investigation, which primarily involves the human being’s universal and existential questions as well as the diverse sources and forms of uneasiness in contemporaneity. Known for her “diagrams,” Rita Damasceno works with the visual representation of thought through dialectic narratives that combine image, aesthetics, text and cognition, proposing exercises for reflection as a means of questioning the world.At the age of 16, Rita Damasceno moved to Germany, where she earned her BA and MA in philosophy and political science from the University of Cologne, from 1984 to 1991. During that period, she also attended classes taught by Joseph Beuys at the University of Düsseldorf. In 2011, the artist returned to Brazil, where she earned her BA in visual arts from Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado (FAAP), in 2015. Her solo shows have most notably included Avesso, at Galeria Superfície (2016, São Paulo), while group shows she has taken part in include Ocupação Conceição Evaristo, at Itaú Cultural (2016, São Paulo) and Anual de Arte, at MAB FAAP (2012 and 2013, São Paulo).
