Leda Catunda

Leda Catunda Serra, known as Leda Catunda (born 1961) is a Brazilian painter, sculptor, graphic artist and educator. She is a representative name of the Geração 80 artists' group. Her works explore the limits of textures and materials, being characterized by her "soft paintings" over towels, bedclothes, leather, velvet and silk.

1961
Leda Catunda is born in São Paulo. Daughter of Vera Catunda Serra architect and landscaper and Geraldo Serra Gomes, architect and professor of the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo.

1980
He graduated in 1984 with a degree in Plastic Arts at Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado (FAAP).

"We were living the last years of the government of General Figueiredo, the end of the military dictatorship, we were therefore tied up and without power of action. At the same time, movements were organized by direct elections with marches through the Anhangabau valley. They were really exciting and came out as a nod that things could finally change for the better. I was finishing plastic arts at FAAP and developing a painting job. Incredibly, at the time, the resurgence of painting was unexpected in a post-dematerialization context of art and the conceptual art of the 1970s. "

(CATUNDA, Leda, text of the artist's file "As it was in the 80's ...", undated, unpublished.)

Historian and art critic Tadeu Chiarelli comments on the FAAP environment in the 1980s.

"The debate that was going on in the rooms and corridors of FAAP was very interesting. On one side were some fundamental teachers for the theoretical and practical formation of the students - Walter Zanini, Nelson Leirner, Regina Silveira, Julio Plaza -, all of them opening the doors to the discussions about art and its nature; On art as concept and as commodity; On the dematerialisation of art, the concept of ready-made ... Meanwhile, in international journals - avidly read by the student - published well-illustrated articles on the "return to painting", on the German savages, the Italian transvanguarda , About Schnabel, Fischer, Sandro Chia, Clemente ... There was, therefore, a mismatch. "

(Tadeu CHIARELLI - "Problematizando the nature of the painting." In: Leda Catunda, São Paulo: Cosac & Naify Edições, 1998. p 9.)

1981
Exhibits for the first time in the "IX Salão de Arte Jovem de Santos". In the same year, she participated in two collective exhibitions: "International Festival of Women in the Arts", São Paulo and "V Young Salon of Contemporary Art", Civic Center of Santo André, São Paulo.


1982
She becomes a teacher of the class of teacher-artist Regina Silveira. Leda establishes from the beginning of her trajectory a relationship that has intensified over the years with the teaching of art and with its teachers.

1983
He holds the exhibition "Pintura Como Meio", at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (Ibirapuera). The exhibition, designed by Sérgio Romagnolo, was presented to Aracy Amaral, then director of the Museum, who welcomed her. Works by Ana Tavares, Ciro Cozzolino, Leda Catunda, Sérgio Niculicheff and Sérgio Romagnolo were exhibited. From this collection new invitations come up.

"Then emerges the painting integrated to the environment, a two-dimensional space that receives painting and in which the absence of frame gives an insinuating intermediation as in all artists who use this demystifying" artifice "between the real and virtual space of their pictorial work .
A naked painting in its naturism is thus transparent, regardless of whether it is figurative or not, but as visual visual communication valid in itself, without the pose of "great painting," though substantially painting.

Aracy AMARAL. - "A Young Painting in São Paulo" in: Painting Medium Catalog, Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo, 1983. p. 1.

In this exhibition Leda exposes for the first time what works he calls "fences".

"By using childrens' towels as well as printed fabrics commonly used for clothing and / or children's clothing, Leda sealed the images produced there. Without using a chassis or any other harder structure to support the fabrics, the artist often sewed one piece of cloth to the other thereby increasing the area of ​​action on the prints. (...) [Leda] introduced in this cold operation of ready-made images the "romantic" gesture of painting - which increased the ironic character of his work. "

(Tadeu CHIARELLI - "Problematizing the nature of painting." In: Leda Catunda, São Paulo: Cosac & Naify Edições, 1998. p.11 and 12)

In the same year, she was invited by Professor Júlio Plaza to participate, with a video-text work, of the "XVII International Biennial of São Paulo". He also participates in the exhibition "Art on the Street, Out Door", Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo and "Painting Brazil", Clóvis Salgado Foundation, Belo Horizonte. She is a class monitor of Professor Walter Zanini in the discipline History of Art.

1984
He exhibits at the "Stand 320" collective at the Thomas Cohn Contemporary Art Gallery and "How are you, Generation 80?" At Parque Lage both in Rio de Janeiro. Participates in a collective with Sérgio Romagnolo, Ciro Cozzolino and Leonilson at the Luisa Strina Gallery in São Paulo and the 1st Havana Biennial in Cuba.

1985
Holds the first solo exhibition at Thomas Cohn Contemporary Art, Rio de Janeiro. The critic Wilson Coutinho writes in the Jornal do Brasil about the exhibition:

"The São Paulo artist Leda Catunda, 24, curiously performs her first solo album not in São Paulo but here. (...) She uses numerous industrial materials such as rugs, mattresses and quilts, and with this she creates an extremely captivating and joyful figuration, unlike other artists from São Paulo who are handling the industrial debris applied in the metaphor of the ugly, The horror and the ostentatious debauchery. "

(Wilson COUTINHO - Bela Indústria, Jornal do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, August 16, 1985.)

In an interview with Baravelli, Leda exposes her opinion on the situation of the young São Paulo art:

"Leda Catunda: Nowadays there is a super material painting, which is very far from my work. I even painted with oil paint and had that phantalo bluepaint. I like color very much, but I do not think of "surface" and "non-surface". This line of painting requires something clear.

Baravelli: Formalista to damn ...

L: It is quite formalistic, I feel in another club, more with Luiz Zerbini, Leonílson and Sérgio Romagnolo.

B: Here in São Paulo you have these two currents: the class of matter and the class of the figure. Is it so for your generation?

L: I think so. The class of matter has a reference, stronger and easier, of German painting, concretism, a known basis that my work does not have. We are still looking for a way to be defined.

(BARAVELLI, "Baravelli visits Leda Catunda." Revista Galeria, nº10, 1988.)

Exhibits at the "National Salon of Plastic Arts", Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro and at the "XVIII International Biennial", São Paulo. On the issues at stake in the 1985 Biennial, curator Ivo Mesquita comments:

"... the return to the painting proposed by the works would confirm the natural talent and the vocation of the Brazilian art to contemporaneity, because the same happened simultaneously in the rest of the world. The revival of painting in those years was immediately interpreted as a return to the direct and sensual mode of the Brazilian to relate to the plastic languages, as a reaction to cerebralism and to the excess of metaphors of the art produced by previous generations (which, In Brazil, meant not only confronting the issues of contemporary visuality but also being in constant conflict with institutionalized censorship by the military). The consecration came in 1985 when Rodrigo Andrade, Fernando Barata, Carlito Carvalhosa, Leda Catunda, Fabio Miguez and Daniel Senise were presented on the Grande Screen of the XVIII International Biennial of São Paulo along with artists such as Enzo Cucchi, Gunter Damisch, Martin Disler, Stefano Di Stasio, Dukoupil, Koberling, Middendorf, Salome, Hubert Scheibl, Tadanori Yokoo, some of the stars of the international scene of the time. "

(Ivo MESQUITA- Territory of the senses in: Daniel Senise, she who is not in São Paulo Cosac & Naify editions, 1998. p.11).

He also participated in the exhibitions "New Brazilian Painting", Center for Art and Communication CAYC, Buenos Aires, Argentina, "Brasilidade e Independência", National Theater, Brasília and "Today's Art of Brazil", Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan.

1986
Performs the individual "Space Research", at the Art Museum of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre. He participates in several collective exhibitions, among which the following stand out: "Transvanguarda e Culturas Nacionais", at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro; "El Escritte Volador", in Guadalajara, Mexico; "Brazilian Painting", Snug Harbor Cultural Center, New York, United States. In that same year, he began to teach the discipline of Graphic Arts for the course of Degree in Artistic Education at FAAP.
In an interview on the occasion of the opening of the compact exhibition of the XVIII Biennial in Brasilia, Leda comments on her work:

"In general I do not really like drawing I always go more or less behind something that is drawn or some structure. I started behind some prints that were already drawn and when I started to work with the cloths, some textures appeared that were also interesting, so the whole thing was mixing and even happened to enter the object, as in the work that came here, which It's a blanket. An object does not escape its symbology. "

(CATUNDA, Leda in an interview with Celso Araujo, In: The Right to Daydream in the New Art of the Country, Jornal Correio braziliense, Brasilia, Distrito Federal January 27, 1986.)

1987
It realizes the first individual in the city of São Paulo, in the Gallery Luisa Strina. In this exhibition, eight figurative paintings on different supports were exposed as towels, sun umbrella, lace, plastic, wigs and leather.

Participates in the collective "Painting Outside the Frame", in the Espaço Capital, Brasília; "Modernity", Museum of Modern Art of Paris, France; "Second Generation Image", at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo; "TV Cubo", at Galeria Mônica Figueiras, São Paulo.

1988
It shows individually, at Thomas Cohn Contemporary Art, Rio de Janeiro.

"Nowadays it is less literal in relation to the image, Leda has sought to explore in the standardized materials and objects of her work a means of experiencing textures at the same time as some works already point in a direction different from that" Narration "above. (...) The "Babados" radically evade the question of image, as the artist was presenting and assume, in this case, an exclusive and even abstract pictorial dimension.

Ligia CANONGIA. The industrial art of Leda. O Globo, August 21, 1988.

Exhibits in the collective: "Modernity", Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo; "1981-1987", Galeria Arco Arte Contemporânea, São Paulo; "88 X 66", Lage Park / Sergio Porto Space, Rio de Janeiro; "Planar Dimension", Funarte, Rio de Janeiro. He began to teach drawing classes at his atelier in São Paulo.

1989
Alongside Ana Tavares, Monica Nador and Sergio Romagnolo will participate in the exhibition "Arte Hybrida", which took place at Funarte, Rio de Janeiro and will travel to the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo and to the BFB Cultural Space, Porto Alegre.

"[Leda Catunda] It is, in my view, the author of effective" combine paintings "in the sense used when referring to Robert Rauschemberg's 1960s works. That is, painting is applied as an element of connection, at this moment of its production, between the objects assembled, without quality as painting, but acting as an element to print body, two-dimensional physicality in the relief of his works. "

Aracy AMARAL - Four artists in: Arte Hibrida, Galeria Rodrigo de Mello Franco, Funarte, Rio de Janeiro; Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo and BFB Cultural Space, Porto Alegre, 1989.

In the same year, he shows his works in the exhibitions "Eduardo Brandão Collection", Casa Triângulo, São Paulo; In the "Recent Perspectives", Centro Cultural São Paulo; In "YOU-ABC", Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, The Netherlands; In the "Panorama of Contemporary Brazilian Art", Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo.

nineteen ninety
It presents individually a set of works produced between the years of 1983 to 1990 in the Museum of Contemporary Art of Americana, São Paulo. With the works carried out between the years of 1989 to 1990 he exhibits in the individual ones in Recife, Pasárgada Arte Contemporânea and Galeria São Paulo. About the latter writes Angelica de Moraes, in Jornal da Tarde and lisette lagnado in Folha de São Paulo:

"The exhibition, of 13 works, presents some aspects that will surprise even those who closely follow the work of this artist. The show was built between two poles. The pop figures of the fabric prints, assembled by machine sewing, now divide the gallery space with works dating to a more cerebral, neo-concrete side.
This new aspect of the production of Leda Catunda translates into paintings-sculptures that explore clean surfaces and industrial colors in materials such as formica gloss or matte. The accumulation of figures has been simplified in geometries and abstract visual games. "

(MORAES, Angelica, Leda Catunda between the fussy-pop and neo-concrete) Jornal da Tarde, São Paulo, 10/30/1990)

"The immediate identification of the figuration walks towards a simplified abstraction of balls and rectangles. The search for abstract language represents an effort to get out of the youthful stigma of the little flowers and little houses that, from the beginning of her career, accompany the artist. The weight of irony has left room for a more joyful and intriguing appropriation of the repertoire of mass culture. "

Lisette Lagnado- Parts are feminine and predictive- Folha de São Paulo 10/30/1990.

Exhibits in the collective: U-ABC, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal; Noah's Ark, Graphic Gesto Gallery, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais. He wins the Brasília Prize for Plastic Arts, Museum of Art of Brasilia.

1991
He participates in several collective exhibitions both in Brazil and abroad, of which we can highlight: "Viva Brasil Viva", Liljevalchs Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden; "Mito y Magia", Museum of Contemporary Art of Monterrey, Mexico; "Brazil La Nueva Generacion", Museum of Fine Arts of Caracas, Venezuela; "Contemporary Art", Historical Center of Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro; "BR / 80", Itaú Gallery, São Paulo.

1992
Holds individual exhibitions at Centro Cultural São Paulo; In the Module Centro Diffusor of Art, Lisbon, Portugal and in the Gallery São Paulo. Participates in the collective "Entretrópicos", Museum of Contemporary Art Sofia Imberg, Caracas, Venezuela; "Salão Paraense de Arte Contemporânea" (as a guest artist), Belém; "Today ... Central Avenue", National Museum of Fine Arts, Rio de Janeiro. He also participates in the collective exhibition "Artistas Latinoamericanos del Siglo XX", curated by Waldo Hassmunsen, organized by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York at the Plaza de Armas, Seville, Spain, for which five paintings from different periods The trajectory of the artist.

"By exposing the techniques she empolys to fabricate her art-collage, assemblage, and sewing- Catunda undermines the sense of visual spectacle intrinsic to painting, especially to realist styles. Working against realism as the privileged site of identity, Catunda invokes Minimalism as the ground for reconstructing subjectivity. In his recent works, such as the series Blue Patches, 1991-1992, or Yellow Pillows, 1992, Catunda reduces the pictorial and anecdotal references while emphasizing texture, plasticity, scale, and volume. Yet, in foregrounding tactility and the sensory, as well as the sense of pleasurable abandonment evident in her use of materials, Catunda genders and eroticizes the Minimalist object. "

Charles MEREWETHER - The subject's poweriessness in: Latin American Artists of XX century. Museum the Art Modern, New York, 1992-1993.

1993
The collective exhibition "Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century", for the National Center for Art and Culture Georges-Pompidou, Paris, France; Museum Ludwig Kunsthalle Josef-Haubrich, Cologne, Germany and MoMA, New York, United States. In that year he made three individual exhibitions: in the Center Module Diffuser of Art, Porto, Portugal; Thomas Cohn Contemporary Art, Rio de Janeiro and the Pulitzer Art Gallery, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Participates in the national collective exhibitions: "The Path of Niterói", Paço Imperial, Rio de Janeiro, which is also presented at Centro Cultural São Paulo; "The Presence of Ready Made", Museum of Contemporary Art, University of São Paulo; "Project: Brazilian Contemporary Art", Museum of Contemporary Art of USP. She is a member of the International Collectives: "From Rio to Rio", OMR Gallery, Mexico City, Mexico and "Ultra Modern: The Art of Contemporary Brazil". Historian and art critic Paulo Herkenhoff writes one of the texts in the catalog:

"The theatrical lust of the" Five Languages ​​"brings the unpleasant memory of an erotic experience of tactile horror. This repulsive tactile experience is also a memory of the physical gesture of possession of things, of the compulsion to consume the small miseries of the world of things. The strength of Leda Catunda's play of ironies does not cease: the soft geometry of "Five circles" is perpetually doomed to inaccuracy, but it also smiles at the Brazilian constructive tradition. "

(HERKENHOFF, Paulo, "The Contemporary Art of Brazil: Theoretical Constructs" In: Ultra Modern: The Art of Contemporary Brazil, The National Museum of Women in the Art, Washington, 1993. p.85)

1994
In an article published in the magazine Art in America, Alisa Tanger writes about the production of Catunda:

"As she worked through such narrative structures, Catunda began to reduce pictorial references, moving in a minimalist direction yet emphasizing bright, saturated colors and textures. Sometimes the titles of works still insinuate content, such as two bellies (Two Bellies, 1993) wherein two stuffed and sagging irregular pink rectangles jut out from a large pink rectangular support. Other recent wall hangings, however, seem entirely removed from anedotal associations. In most recent works, Catunda's motif is primary geometric shapes, usually circles. She collages stuffied, sheredded and painted shapes to make a kinder, more alluring and wackier minimalism. "

Alicia TAGER. "Paradoxes and transfigurations". Art in America. July 1994. p.46-47.

He exhibits individually at the Volpi Gallery, Ricardo Cassiano Foundation, São José dos Campos, São Paulo. Participates in the press conferences: "Small Latin American Format", Luigi Marrozini Gallery, San Juan, Puerto Rico; "Biennial Brazil Century XX" Biennial Foundation, São Paulo; "XXII Biennial International", Biennial Foundation, São Paulo; "20 years of Contemporary Art from the Luisa Strina Gallery", São Paulo Art Museum.
http://hisour.com/artist/leda-catunda/