Group Exhibition

10 Years – Luis Maluf Art Gallery

 

Aline Bispo Aline Moreno Antonio Bokel Barbara Basseto Bu’ú Kennedy Cranio Daniela Busarello Deco Adjiman Desirée Feldmann Edu Silva Janet Vollebregt Karola Braga Leandra Espírito Santo Licida Vidal Raphael Sagarra_finok Shizue Sakamoto Tatiane Freitas Vhils    Zanini de Zanine

‘To dream is to wake up inward,’ said the poet Mario Quintana. And it was with this inner awakening that Luis followed his instinct 10 years ago and opened the first unit of his eponymous gallery in São Paulo, a space whose purpose from the outset was to encourage and foster contemporary art. But the story we are celebrating today began years earlier and deserves to be remembered on this date.

When he was younger, Luis lived in a mixed-use building that housed residential flats as well as artists’ studios, where countless creative meetings took place. It was in this vivid environment that he found comfort, imbued with the smell of paint and the many conversations about the cultural milieu. There, the dream of being an artist was born, which soon sharpened the business acumen he discovered as a gift. He experimented in a few related areas until he decided to become an entrepreneur. So the middle-class young man bought a kombi with a colleague and started selling works by artists he liked on the streets of São Paulo.

 

From then on, his bond with the arts blossomed, took many directions and formats and was consolidated through a deep relationship with the city. Public art brought Luis closer to architecture, public space and a possible project for society. It made him interested in everything that surrounds it, from concrete to nature, from noise to subversion. It led him to look at works and artists without preconceptions, seeking out the diversity of languages, genres and forms, as well as discussions and reflections on the role of the market in this vast network of interconnections.

She invested time and resources in opening a new gallery in the Barra Funda neighbourhood, balancing the commercial and conceptual sides and even putting more emphasis on national production and on innovative and necessary projects, such as the Artist Residency, now in its fourth edition, expanding the possibilities of artistic practice and the education and training of visual artists around the country.

 

On this path, his attentive gaze met that of many artists whose lines of research include the idea of territory, be it celestial or earthly. Through art, they develop works that discuss these universes and their relationship with the world. This rich and plural process has made this trajectory, and consequently this celebration, possible. For this date, artists represented today by Luis Maluf Galeria de Arte have developed new works, all interconnected with the founder’s trajectory, but also that speak to the spatiality of the region where we are located. Thus, the group show presented at the Barra Funda unit is a reflection and an invitation to think about this vast creative and multidisciplinary universe that surrounds us internally and externally.

 

— Ana Carolina Ralston