Superfície is pleased to present Ancestral Venus, the first solo exhibition dedicated to the work of Celeida Tostes in São Paulo. With text by Pollyana Quintella, the exhibition revisits the important trajectory of the artist who dedicated her life to the dialogue between art and education, expanding the limits in the sculpture field.

Celeida Tostes chose clay as the main material and support for her experiments, distancing herself from the path of her avant-garde colleagues to explore her own artistic language through ceramics. The artist worked on building a pedagogical methodology that guided students towards intuitive research and body awareness. She developed the Fire Arts and Materials Transformation Workshop [Oficina de Artes do Fogo e transformação de materiais] in Parque Lage, where she taught for more than twenty years. Her pedagogical research was consolidated in a project in Morro do Chapéu da Mangueira, in 1980, which aimed to discover matter through making, encouraging students to rescue their own creative languages.

The relevance of her work as an artist opened space for Celeida Tostes to participate in important exhibitions on the national and international scene. In addition to presenting Projeto Gesto Arcaico (1990-91) at the 21st Bienal de São Paulo (1991), the artist was the brazilian representative at the collective exhibition Arquitetura de Terra ou O futuro de uma Tradição Millenar (1981) organized by the Center Georges Pompidou in Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and which later moved on to other important institutions, such as MAM Rio, MASP and the Calouste Gulbelkian Foundation, in Lisbon. In 1996, shortly after her death, Celeida Tostes was honored at the II Bienal Barro de América, in Caracas.

Her artistic practice mirrors the principles she developed in classroom: with a strong experimental character, Celeida’s production attests to her emancipatory, collective pedagogy, connected to the senses and elements. Concept and material complement each other: the earth and the feminine, as well as the themes related to them — organic matter, fertility, sexuality, motherhood, birth and death — are the guiding threads in the artist’s work, which transforms clay into ceramic bodies. Among the almost 30 works present, the exhibition presents: Venus and Guardians, which allude, respectively, to the feminine and masculine, the uterus and the phallus, gestation and movement; Stamps, an important work that highlights aspects of her production, such as the multiplicity of signatures and the idea of ​​circuit; Amassadinhos, a synthesis work, originated from what the artist called Archaic Gesture [Gesto Arcaico], the reflexive act of closing one’s hand over any material.

With a trajectory that challenges the dynamics of the art world, Celeida Tostes used her artistic work as a tool for social transformation, taking her work beyond individual performance or the construction of the object. Ancestral Venus is scheduled to open on March 23rd, 2024 and will remain on display until May 18th.