Galeria Superfície is pleased to invite you to the opening of the exhibition “Território Gravado”, the first solo show by the Minas Gerais artist Lotus Lobo, a new represented artist by Superfície. Curated by professor and visual artist Marcelo Drummond, the show houses works from the 1960s/1970s, as well as works from his most recent production, 2019.

Lotus Lobo’s artistic practice is deeply identified with the technical, but also experimental, repertoire of Lithography, also contemplating the rescue and preservation of the memory of the engraving language in Minas Gerais.

Her research is characterized by the diversified use of supports and procedures extracted from the lithographic process, its technical-expressive capacity, which manifests itself as an important material and conceptual contribution to the sedimentation of authorial language. Such investigation begins with the appropriation and resignification of industrial lithographic marks, permeates the experimentation of different bases (stone, paper, plastic, acrylic and tinplate), culminating in the intervention and re-reading of the marks (annotations).

During this vast production, Lotus Lobo constituted an important collection of lithographic stones, zinc matrixes and tinplate packaging from Estamparia Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, 1930–1960. On these supports, there are drawings of old brands of food products: butter, candy, biscuits, tobacco and lard. This collection served, significantly, as an iconographic repertoire in the production of works from different periods of her artistic trajectory. Such experiences, inaugurated in the 1970s, were seminal in the artist’s discursive construction and still reverberate in her contemporary production.

In her artistic career, her participation in the X Bienal de São Paulo (1969) deserves special mention, when he received the Prêmio Itamaraty for exhibiting three objects-engravings that could be manipulated by the public, and also in the emblematic exhibition “Do corpo à terra”, organized by the art critic Frederico Morais, held in the Parque Municipal de Belo Horizonte (1970).

In the exhibition “Território Gravado”, copies of the notorious series Maculaturas (1970) will be exhibited, as well as works from the series of Estamparia Litográfica (2016), consisting of lithographic prints on cardboard boxes, paperboard, wrapping paper and reuse of current product packaging.

In total, thirty works will be exhibited in variable supports and dimensions, conceived from original prints and objects from its vast collection of industrial lithography: zinc matrixes, lithographic stones and paper prints in various formats will be arranged and articulated on shelves, tables and walls, in order to enhance the creation of a powerful visual vocabulary, loaded with temporalities, articulated through the principles of printing, appropriation and editing. The artist will show three unpublished works specially conceived for the exhibition.

The exhibition establishes an “Território Gravado” and thus becomes an opportunity to meet the trajectory of this Brazilian artist who has contributed for 55 years to rescue, conserve and rewrite, in a particular way, the history of lithographic language, its modes and expressive means, in full dialogue with contemporary processes.