Miguel Rio Branco – Photographs 1968-1992
Le BAL presents the photographic work of the first period (1968-1992) by Brazilian artist Miguel Rio Branco, a major figure of contemporary art in his country, known worldwide for his multimedia installations and works.
Miguel Rio Branco is a polymorphic artist. At the age of twenty, he studied photography in New York, whose effervescence fed his poetic drifts and his first paintings. He lives in the slums of southeastern Manhattan, the East Village, and the Bowery, where all influences mingle. He befriends his compatriot Helio Oiticica, open to the most radical experiments. He also witnesses the innovations of a local child, Gordon Matta Clark, who cuts his geometries out of sections of ruined buildings.
Back in Brazil, Miguel Rio Branco lived successively in the Nordeste, with emerald researchers, then in the Pelourinho district, in Salvador de Bahia, which then housed, in unsanitary conditions, deprived families and prostitutes.
Miguel Rio Branco captures bodies, men or women, their glory or their fatigue, their modesty, and their exhibitions, in willingly tight frames, where the background loses all depth. Her gaze supports that of her models: nothing is concealed. The characters are back to the wall. “Photography most often oppresses or suffocates reality,” said the artist.
By dint of approaching, his images are imbued with dreaminess, without avoiding the grotesque, which overflows or that they provoke, as in the last Goya. For Miguel Rio Branco, we have spoken of “exorbitant realism”: disaster catches the eye; the imagination has no other outlet than reality, its violence, its immediacy. The wounds are so many narrative shards, “without beginning or end”, poem-images in the ruins of the world.
(Alexis Fabry and Diane Dufour, exhibition curators).
About the Author
Miguel Rio Branco (born in Las Palmas in 1946) is a Brazilian artist (photographer, painter, filmmaker, and creator of multimedia installations) living and working in Rio de Janeiro.
In 1966, he studied at the New York Institute of Photography and in 1968 went to study at the School of Industrial Design in Rio de Janeiro. Between 1970 and 1972, he worked in New York as a director and cinematographer, then directed in the years that followed several experimental feature films and short films. At the same time, he began to exhibit his photographs in 1972.
From 1980 he became a correspondent for Magnum Photos and his photographic work was published in numerous journals (Aperture, Stern, Photo Magazine).
Considering the book as an essential medium of expression, he designs many works including Sudor Dulce Amargo (Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico City, 1985), Natka (Fundação Cultural de Curitib, 1996), Silent Book (Cosac & Naify, 1997 ), Miguel Rio Branco (Aperture, 1998) and Maldicidade (Taschen, 2019). Her work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including Beauty, the Beast at the Art Institute of Boston in 2003; Pleasure of pain at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris in 2005; Solo at Kulturhuset Stockholm in 2011; Miguel Rio Branco: Nada Levarei quando morrer at the Museu de Arte in São Paulo in 2017 as well as Miguel Rio Branco at the Moreira Salles Institute in São Paulo in 2020.
His works are present in many European and American public and private collections, notably: Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro; Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo; Center George Pompidou, Paris; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego; MoMA, New York.
MIGUEL RIO BRANCO – PHOTOGRAPHS 1968-1992
SEPTEMBER 16 – DECEMBER 6, 2020
LE BAL, PARIS
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