COPENHAGEN.- David Risley Gallery presents a solo show by Brazilian, Copenhagen-based artist Tamar Guimarães. The Latin/Portuguese title of the show, 'Dura Lex Sed Lex, no cabelo so Gumex' (The law is hard, but it is fair— if only you wear Gumex in your hair) quotes a Brazilian advertising campaign from the 1960‘s, which with an appropriate amount of humour, brings together political authority and the worlds of advertising and consumption.
Guimarães’ work is research based, often making use of found material and associative narrative threads. Thinking of documents as palimpsests, her practice proposes historical narratives as contingent and fluid, as spaces from which one can speculate on the present.
The works 'Dura Lex Sed Lex' (2009) and 'A Man Called Love' (2008) deal respectively with Daniel Paul Schreber—the son of the reknowned pedagogue, orthopedist, and inventor of the 'Schrebergarten' (allotment garden) Moritz Schreber—and with Francisco Candido Xavier, the famous Brazilian medium. Both projects are investigations of states of rapture and their intersection with state law and authority.
Daniel Paul Schreber suffered a mental breakdown shortly after he had been appointed as President of the Saxon Supreme Court, Dresden in 1893. In 'Dura Lex Sed Lex', the High Court judge who currently occupies Schreber's position agreed to submit himself to a session of hypnosis and read excerpts from Schreber's memoirs. This reading is presented on an acetate record.
Xavier lived under two Brazilian military dictatorships and wrote over 400 books delivered to him from the beyond. 'A Man Called Love', a slide projection with an evocative voice-over, tells of Xavier and the vicissitudes of twentieth century Brazilian history.
Tamar Guimarães was born in Belo Horizonte and lives and works in Copenhagen. She attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York, the Royal Danish Academy, the Art Academy in Malmö, and Goldsmiths College in London. Recent exhibitions include Panorama at the Museum of Modern Art in Sao Paulo; Artspace Sydney, Australia; Bright Morning Star, Kenneth Anger cycle, at Galeria Zé dos Bois, Lisbon, Portugal; the the 7th Gwangju Biennial in Gwangju, Korea, and the 3rd Guangzhou Triennial in China.
This exhibition is the first in a new series of artist invitationals at David Risley Gallery. Artists invited to show at the gallery are invited to propose an artist for an exhibition. Tamar Guimaraes was proposed by Ann Lislegaard who will show new work here later this year.
