New York’s Jack Shainman Gallery has taken on representation of the estate of Brazilian artist Emanoel Araújo, an abstractionist who worked in painting and sculpture. The late artist’s first exhibition with gallery will open in September at its West 20th Street space in Chelsea.
The representation deal had been in the works for over a year, well before he died unexpectedly last September at 81.
Listen beautiful relax classics on our Youtube channel.
“When this all started, Emanoel was alive and very well,” Shainman said. “It wasn’t about taking on an estate; it was about taking on this amazing person. It was all planning for a show that was going to happen with him coming to New York.”
He continued, “We had so many plans. We immediately had the idea to do collaborative shows back and forth” between the Museu Afro Brasil in São Paulo, which Araújo had founded in 2004 and run until his death, and Shainman’s three gallery locations, including his Upstate New York space the School. (Next year, the gallery will open a new space in Tribeca.)
Shainman had been first introduced to Araújo’s work by fellow dealer Graham Steele and ARTnews Top 200 Collector Bob Rennie, a longtime client of Shainman. Because of the pandemic, Shainman didn’t have the opportunity to fly out to São Paulo to meet Araújo in person, so they communicated over Zoom. “Although they were Zoom calls, believe it or not, we had an amazing connection. He was an extraordinary person—he was glowing. We were so glad to meet each other.”
In many of Araújo’s works, variously colored shapes intersect and collapse into each other, ultimately creating new forms altogether. He pushed the bounds between painting and sculpture, making shaped canvases from wood that were wall-mounted as well as ones that were freestanding.
“His work encompasses so many things,” Shainman said. “I just have such a total fascination with it. There’s an energy that the pieces have when you look at them. It almost brings you energy—it’s bigger than the thing is. The more you spend time with them, the more they reveal themselves. They’re both simple and super complex simultaneously, so there’s that tension.”
The exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery in the fall will survey much of Araújo’s career, with pieces from as early as the 1970s all the way to 2021. They range from a large circular sculpture in mostly black with pops of red (Redondo e raio vermelho, 2017) to an untitled 2017 work in which red and grey crisscross each other several times over.
“Many of the works were spoken about and chosen with him before he passed,” Shainman said, noting that the gallery had begun to ship some to New York. “Honestly, I chose works that were my favorite. The estate gave us carte blanche, and we will be showing top-notch works.”
Araújo was also an influential teacher and the founder of the Museu Afro Brasil, located in an Oscar Niemeyer–designed building in São Paulo’s Ibirapuera Park, not far from the city’s famed Biennale Pavilion. The museum’s collection numbers over 6,000 objects ranging from painting and sculpture to ceramics and engravings to historical documents and photographs, all aimed at showing the impact of Black people on Brazilian society.
“He was a mentor to so many young artists,” Shainman added. “He put the money up and bought their work—talk about creating a support system. That was a huge part of his identity.”
Prior to founding the Museu Afro Brasil, Araújo served as director of the Museu de Arte da Bahia (1981–83), director of the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (1992–2002), and Municipal Secretary of Culture for São Paulo (2005). He was the subject of a mid-career retrospective in 2007 at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake in São Paulo and a survey at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) in 2018 as part of the museum’s “Histórias afro-atlânticas”program for that year.
Outside his home country, Araújo is not as widely known, though he has been collected by major international institutions, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Tate Modern in London, and the Museum of Sydney. Part of the gallery’s charge with the new representation is to bring Araújo’s art and contributions to a wider audience.
“I’ve always loved introducing something into the arena that’s not really known or not thought about,” Shainman said. “Emanoel had a whole career in Brazil, so although his work isn’t really known here, it is bringing something in on such a high level. In some ways he got overlooked because he was doing so many other things in addition to making his art.”
Source: artnews.com