MARIA MARTINS - TROPICAL FICTIONS

This book accompanies the exhibition Maria Martins: Desejo Imaginante co-organized by MASP – Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand and by Casa Roberto Marinho in Rio de Janeiro, curated by Isabella Rjeille and by adjunct curator Fernanda Lopes. Known for her bronze sculptures and her involvement with international Surrealism, Maria Martins is one of the most thought-provoking figures in modern Brazilian art. Due to her marriage with the diplomat Carlos Martins, the artist spent much of her adult life and artistic training outside Brazil, returning to the country permanently in 1950. The exhibition and this accompanying book, titled Maria Martins: Tropical Fictions, aim to examine Martins’s multiple activities, taking into account her work not only as an artist, but also as a cultural intermediary. The essays collected here address how she articulated throughout her production various imaginaries about Brazil and the tropics—a place she claimed, reaffirmed, and reinvented almost as a fiction—in addition to analyzing the reception and dialogues her work inspired in the different contexts in which it circulated, from Brazil to Latin America, Asia, Europe, and the United States. This book is richly illustrated with images of works produced throughout the artist’s entire career, as well as historical and personal photographs that narrates the story of her life. This publication features curatorial essays by Isabella Rjeille and Fernanda Lopes, and essays by Alyce Mahon, Beverly Adams, Joanna Fiduccia, Marina Mazze Cerchiaro, Mariola Alvarez, Verônica Stigger, Terri Geis, Tirza T. Latimer and Laura Cosendey.