In order to promote Brazilian art and artists, in addition to stimulating its production of Contemporary Art, we announce the four finalists of PIPA Prize 2020. In this edition, we faced many questions. However, we have decided to follow the original idea of the prize since maintaining the institutions is also a form of resistance in critical social moments. Nonetheless, some changes are inevitable in this pandemic context. We chose to postpone the Finalists’ Exhibition at the Paço Imperial to 2021, still without a set date.
The four finalists chosen by the PIPA Board from the 67 nominated artists will each receive a donation of R$ 30 thousand, which will be divided into two moments. This year, upon signing the term of commitment, each one receives R$ 15 thousand. Next year, when the exhibition is due to take place, the four artists will receive an additional R$ 15,000 donation. The winner receives an additional amount of R$30 thousand.
The Jury will have as parameters to choose the winner: the artist’s portfolio, the work(s) presented at the finalists’ exhibition, and a letter of intent from the artist explaining for what he or she would use the R$ 30 thousand as a winner. This value aims to make it possible to carry out a project at the artist’s choice, which may be for the publication of a book, for an artistic residency, for a research trip, or any other project in which this extra donation of R$ 30 thousand is relevant in his or her career.
The Board’s definition of the four finalists follows the guidance given to the indicators in the first stage of the prize, namely: to point out artists with recent but already relevant trajectories. What we mean by recent and relevant in a trajectory, in which there is no objective specification, always implies a heated debate. It could not be otherwise.
What is sought with the choice of PIPA finalists is to present a career that has been set up in recent years, which stood out recently, and that reflects the diversity and quality of our art scene. Together, these trajectories must place us simultaneously in the face of local specificities and global challenges. Choices like this are always controversial. We reckon that countless other artists could be finalists each year. However, looking back over the past 11 years and making projections on the continuity of the prize, what we see with the group of finalists is a good portrait of the best Brazilian art at the beginning of the 21st century.
Meet the four finalists (and click in the names to see the pages)
Gê Viana
To create a path in art today, it begins with the idea of exposure, using esthetic categories. I think about the legacy left by the photographers that exposure the daily life of the great metropolis, guetos and traditional peoples. My work is developed at the act of photographing bodies assuming several cuts in photo-collage, coming back as a new body and making wheatpaste in urban/rural intervention experiments. I’ve been in the search for a non-linear artistic expression, throw myself over the research of the performative body and the abject bodies by the hegemonic colonizing culture and its communication and art systems, (marginalized and invisibilized bodies). From a process in Santos with Lívia Aquino, a researcher in the visual arts field, I decided to search the “poor image” and the historical photojournalistic appropriation methods, as so the majority of my works the use of other photographic layers can be seen.
Maxwell Alexandre
Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1990, Maxwell Alexandre graduated in Design from PUC-RJ in 2016 and, in 2009, participated in the ‘Curso de Fotografia para registros das Obras do PAC’ (Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento) making photographic records of the Rio de Janeiro favelas. The artist’s urban poetics consists in the construction of narratives and scenes structured from his daily experiences in the city and in Rocinha, the community where he lives and works. On different supports like doors and iron frames emerge anonymous personages in recurrent situations in the favelas. They are large-format paintings in which the black bodies are presented in an empowered way, but also in moments of confrontation with the police, portraying a radically contemporary community routine.
Randolpho Lamonier
From the industrial suburbs of his hometown to major cities, Randolpho Lamonier develops his visual research using many different media and processes. His work brings together an accumulation of elements and gestures which reflect upon the construction of individual and collective identities. The interweaving between intimacy and public matters articulates the micro and macro politics, a continuous state of reflection and insurgency. Even the tiniest gesture depicted in these works reveals a critical perception of the state of normality.
Renata Felinto
PhD and Master in Visual Arts from the Institute of Arts of UNESP and specialist in Curatorship and Education in Art Museums from the Museum of Contemporary Art of USP. Visual artist and assistant professor at URCA/CE, in which she composed the Scientific Research Committee, she was coordinator of the Visual Arts Degree Course and the PIBID subproject of the same course and coordinates the Research group NZINGA – Novos Ziriguiduns (Inter)Nacionais Gerados na Arte. The art produced by women and men of black-African descent has been the main theme of her research and this reverberates in many ways in her production on visual arts.
The 67 artists in this edition, including the finalists, can also participate in PIPA Online, which will start on July 26th. They will also be part of the bilingual (Portuguese-English) catalogue.
To know more about the finalists and the other participants, visit their pages, containing photos of works, interviews, curriculum, and much more.