Superfície is pleased to present the exhibition Luminous Traces, a solo show by Gerty Saruê at Superfície Vila Modernista. With 14 oil stick drawings, the show recalls the text by professor and art historian Maria Izabel Branco Ribeiro written in 1993, on the occasion of the artist’s exhibition at MAC USP, which included part of the set of drawings.
Gerty Saruê was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1930 and moved to São Paulo in the 1950s, where she followed the unbridled growth of the metropolis. From the start of her work in the 1960s, the urban context, mass culture and industrial society played a fundamental and structuring role in her artistic work.
Over the years, Gerty Saruê’s work has followed a historiographical line of the means of image reproduction: both the technique and the themes of her work reflect the graphic thinking and technological possibilities of different eras, in step with the progress of industrial activity.
The artist took part in important exhibitions, such as the IX São Paulo Biennial in 1967 – and again in the 1969 and 1973 editions – and the Panoramas of Current Brazilian Art at MAM São Paulo in 1975. The 1970s marked the consolidation of his career, with one of her exhibitions having an introductory text written by Mario Schenberg.
Until the end of the 1980s, her production was often based on the use of analog photography, electrostatic copies, offset prints, heliographic copies and plots; in 1990, the artist switched from the uniformity of silkscreen printing and the precise line of India ink to the intense stroke of an oil stick. The adoption of the new medium is symptomatic: her intentions regarding drawing had undergone transformations. For Maria Izabel Branco Ribeiro, “the use of oil sticks of different thicknesses allowed [her] to focus her attention on the gesture and explore its possibilities”. Gerty Saruê’s series of oil stick drawings have rhythmic movements, transforming the surface of the paper into a zone of luminous vibrations. She sometimes superimposes layers of graphics and creates webs that determine different situations in terms of the direction of the stroke, the density of the texture and the amount of material applied. Using only black or only white on white paper, changing the way the light falls. The movement and pressure of his gesture determine the confrontation between areas of brightness and opacity, contraction and expansion.
Luminous Traces is scheduled to open on May 22, 2025, and will remain on display until July 19 of the same year.