Maria Lynch | Submersos Exhibition
MAR 23 | Maria Lynch
“SUBMERSOS” - Maria Lynch’s first solo exhibition in Europe, featured a completely new body of work.
Maria Lynch’s work comprises a number of art forms, such as painting, drawing and sculpture, which are seemingly associated to a practice that develops through canonic formal and chromatic solutions.
The surface of the support, in the context of her painting and drawing, is a two-dimensional plane of a self-referential universe, sometimes akin to a sort of biographic visual writing, which appears to manifest a certain restlessness and compulsion in the act of creation: drawing and painting. That compulsion is not the result of a process that is excessive in terms of the quantity of work produced; its excess is found in the plastic and visual qualities that the artist pursues in an approach marked by a diaristic metric, as if each exhibition was a chapter in a journal that began long ago, and which we will never know for sure when, or if, it will be interrupted.
Maria Lynch’s drawings are very important to our understanding of her work, regardless of whatever exhibition of hers we have before us, featuring paintings, sculptures or drawings from any given point of her career. They are a sort of statement of the memory of her hand, and thus of her emotional and referential universe. One of the essential features of Maria Lynch’s work is, I think, a pathos that inscribes into her pieces a poetical stimulus for the viewer, be that person a visitor of one of her exhibitions, or simply someone looking at one of her works, in her studio or elsewhere. That often occurs in her austere drawings, their clear lines connecting and reconnecting certain shapes that appear to float on or sink into the surface of paper. In this succession of (sometimes near-invisible) micro-events, the viewer’s time plays a crucial role in the enjoyment of her work: both in her paintings and her drawings, the artist carries out a process of revelation and concealment that materialises itself in organic, sometimes even visceral ways.
In this exhibition, titled “Submersos” [Submerged], Maria Lynch presents a new series of paintings and drawings. The paintings, in large and medium formats, are like black screens that reveal and simultaneously conceal invented forms that are evocative of images and fragments of cities, or structural elements wrought with a very frugal and balanced chromatic palette. Searching for a theme or reference may prove a fruitless endeavour, given that these pieces tend to display a more abstract and undefined approach, apparently directed at the geography of the paper or the canvas format. However, certain shapes (and drawing plays an absolutely structural role here) seem evocative of anthropomorphic elements and container-like forms, whose pictorial treatment offers us a memory of the house and its experience. And, in some instances that suggest imaginary, fictional architectures, a possibility to reveal desires or emotions that were experienced or sensed in a place that is Utopian, and thus has no connection with any referable narrative.
The exhibition’s title, “Submersos”, contains a play on language by the artist, since the word “submerged” refers to what lies beneath the thick black texture of the painted surface. At times, the various shapes and lines are fully covered by the black areas; at others, they can still be visible through them; or they can hint at a previous shape that we know is still there, a trace of something submerged we will never be able to access. But we feel its presence, and thus the aforementioned logic of the drawing develops a new dimension, as both a source of that memory of the hand and a reflection on her own work. It is as if the artist is conducting a survey on herself, whose results she shares with others, presenting her language through a diversity of meanings that are close to us, sometimes even intimately so, but which we can only find within the sphere of the artistic process.
A book, published in 2016, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, accompanies this exhibition; it contains a wide-ranging study on Maria Lynch’s oeuvre. As an end note, I would like to mention two drawings, reproduced on page 35 of that book, “Machinery 1 and 2” (2008). Perhaps drawing, in this artist’s work, is like a submerged current that manifests before us in her paintings, her sculptures and, of course, her drawings.
João Silvério
Maria Lynch | Bio
The artist was born in 1981 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, she is current living and working between NY and Rio de Janeiro. In 2008, she earned an MA and a Post-Graduate Diploma from Chelsea College of Art and Design in London.
Her main exhibitions include ‘The Jerwood Drawing Prize’, a traveling exhibit shown in London and across England in 2008, ‘Nova Arte Nova’, at CCBB Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo curated by Paulo Venâncio. In 2010 she was contemplated with the Marcantônio Vilaça Funarte Prize. In 2011 she was invited to the 6th Bienal de Curitiba, Vento Sul curated by Alfons Hug. In 2012, Maria showed the installation ‘Ocupação Macia’ at the Paço Imperial Museum, Rio de Janeiro, and the performance ‘Incorporáveis’ at Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro. The artist was invited to participate in the ‘London Olympics Games Exhibit’ at the Barbican Centre. In 2013, Maria has done the solo show ‘Acontecimento Encarnado’ at Anita Schwartz Gallery in Rio de Janeiro, won the selection for a public art competition at Fundação Getúlio Vargas, RJ, Brazil and show ‘Bordalianos do Brasil’ at Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal.
After completing the Residency Unlimited, NY, USA in 2014, she was awarded with the NY Embasy Prize and Award in NY for an Individual exhibition at the Storefront For Art And Architecture, NY, USA, which was part of Ideas City Festival - New Museum, NY.
In the year 2016, Maria made a solo exhibition, Spaces and Spetacles, at the Wilding Cran Gallery in Los Angeles. In 2017 she opened a solo exhibition titled Máquina Devir at Oi Futuro Rio de Janeiro and was selected for the program Pacif Standart Time, with an exhibition in Los Angeles. In 2018, Maria participated in some exhibitions, like TRIO Biennial and Mulheres na Coleção do Museu de Arte do Rio - MAR.
Bio
Maria Lynch was born in 1981 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, current living and working in Lisbon, Portugal. In 2008, she earned an MA and a Post-Graduate Diploma from Chelsea College of Art and Design in London.
Maria Lynch is part of important private and public collections: Pinacoteca de SP,Brasil - Coleção Ihotim, acervo, MG, Brasil - MAR, Museo de Arte do Rio de Janerio, Brasil- Coleção Gilberto Chateubriand/MAM-RJ, Rio de janeiro, Brasil - Museu de Arte Contemporanea Niterói, Brasil - Committee for Olympic Fine Arts 2012 , London, UK - Ministério das Relações Exteriores, Palácio do Itamaraty, DF, Brasil
