Until April 23, Marcelo Amorim‘s solo show, Dreams of Male Power: A Fabrication Narrative, will be available on the Arrière-Garde gallery website. The exhibition takes place in the Metaverse through the Spatial platform, currently the most popular virtual event management network, with an average reach of 720K continuous visits. This is an engaged and engaging narrative through which the contemporary Brazilian artist challenges power structures construed in Western societies so to shape the domineering White man.
Politically charged yet visually nostalgic, Amorim’s work depicts the historical and institutional construction of White male hegemony in the West. His practice is a reflection on the glorification of the normative Macho Man in the media, over the 20th Century, which also functioned as a form of Queer repression.
In his first major solo exhibition for a London based art gallery, Marcelo Amorim presents a retrospective that encapsulates over two decades of archival research resulting in a body of work composed of oil on canvas, prints and drawings. The artistic production draws on a collection of images extracted from newspapers, magazines, didactic books and the likes, appropriated to narrativize the historical, cultural and behavioural construction of the White, domineering male. After about two decades dedicated to building his national prominence, São Paulo-based Marcelo Amorim presents this international solo show in a digital format that will ensure a far-reaching exposure.
Kalinca Costa Söderlund, the Chief-Curator of this Metaverse Art exhibition, is also the Director of Arrière-Garde. She has delved into her specialism in Brazilian art to outline the conceptual framework of the project. With a PhD in Brazilian art (University of Essex, 2018), she advocates that the political edge of art made in a country which has both rapidly moved from a dictatorial regime to an intense process of socio-economic globalisation, and possesses the cultural hybridity of an exceptionally diverse society, is unique and highly desirable in the international art market. Amorim’s art most certainly proves the point.
Kalinca firmly believes that the implications of today’s technology entail that our lives will increasingly diverge from the limitations of our bodies. Similarly, she also thinks that the implications of the Metaverse entail that curating must diverge from the limitations of the exhibition space. In this project, we are questioning the historically grounded practice of curating, which has heavily depended on the tyranny of the physicality of the exhibition premises. Curating in the Metaverse can mean much more than assigning meaning to artworks through a narrative that abides by the material configuration of the premises that will contain them. Hence, in this project, is the (virtual) space that is curated and idealised to match the qualities of a body of art works; not the other way around.
Marcelo Amorim said: “This is an incredibly exciting project for me and the most cutting edge way of having my work seen globally and outside of Brazil. I think that the Metaverse opens new and effective ways of reaching audiences across the Planet, and that it is allowing artists to have a cross-border visibility never seen before. We are certainly experiencing the digitalisation of the art market; a revolution that is far bigger than the biennalisation of our sector in the 1990s and that will benefit artists in a more inclusive way. When Arrière-Garde’s invitation to be the artist for the launch of its Metaverse Exhibition Programme came, I was thrilled. I have known Kalinca, Arrière-Garde’s Director, since she came to my studio in São Paulo in 2018, and I find her transdisciplinary, collaborative, and technological approach to the art world not only exciting, but also a very innovative way of envisioning the future of the art world.”
Kalinca Costa Söderlund said: “The virtual format of the show will allow people from all over the world to experience Amorim’s art from anywhere. We are proud of launching Amorim on Spatial, a Metaverse platform that has about 50k monthly visitors in the UK and 340k in the US, with about 35% of its age demographics in the 24-35 years old bracket: the one in which a new tech-savvy, curious, democratic, open-minded, ecological, and ethically and politically engaged generation of collectors is mushrooming. All the paintings, prints and drawings on show can be purchased online through Arrière-Garde’s Salerooms, as well as a wider selection of items which corroborate the artist’s visual narrative. Our aim is to question and revise curatorial practice according to the unprecedented languages and possibilities that technology has brought about, to explore new visual media based on technological advancement, to reach a larger and more diverse audience, and to give collectors the opportunity to discover talent based in non-mainstream geographical locations.”
The exhibition project will be accompanied by the publication of an online catalogue, with critical essay by Kalinca Costa Söderlund, which can be found on Arrière-Garde’s Website.
Watch the trailer of the solo show below:
Arrière-Garde’s production team:
London based Composer David Balica, who has produced the soundtracks for the show;
Bruno Macedo, the Director of Rito.cc, a Brazil-based company specialised in developing immersive experiences, who has been responsible for the VR Production on Spatial;
Carlos Rodrigues, a São Paulo-based architect and 3D-model designer, who has designed, together with Amorim, the virtual exhibition space as an extension of the art on show.