Regina Silveira

Alexander Gray Associates presents an exhibition of recent work by multimedia artist Regina Silveira. 
The works on view emphasize Silveira’s use of graphic visual language through accumulation and skewed perspective to transform our perception of spaces. Throughout more than four decades, Silveira, a critical figure 
in Brazilian conceptual art, has investigated the tension between movement and spatial perspective, threading political meaning into installations that respond to specific sites.

Featured in the exhibition is the room-size mixed media installation, Amphibia (2013/16). This large scale immersive work covers the walls and floor of the Gallery’s second level with oversized silhouettes of frogs flowing toward a gilded metal grate in the center of the floor. The placement of frogs, notably one of the biblical plagues, de-familiarizes the Gallery space, employing allegory to evoke contemporary social and political concerns. 
For curator Paulo Miyada, “the woes that afflicted ancient Egypt might be compared in the context of Regina Silveira’s work, to the current ills of corruption, war, and surveillance.”

Silveira’s large scale vinyl installations are informed by her study of printmaking techniques, which provide what she considers a “dry syntax that eschew[s] autographic aspects,” and allow for the reproduction, re-scaling and distortion of photographic images. In Touch (2016), the artist employs traditional engraving to explore “ideas of absence, the marks reveal an event that took place in time,” in this case a hand reaching out and imprinting it’s image on metal. Silveira imbues this seemingly quotidian shape with mystery and fantasy by producing larger than life handprints, resulting in phantasmagorias and visual enigmas.

Silveira’s most recent photoetchings, the Voodoo Series (2015) further question the reality of occurrence and the nature of representation. These images rely on Silveira’s longstanding interest in skiagraphia (the study of shadows) and well as the transformation of ordinary objects into potentially threatening tools. Images of forks, screws, and clips appear to pierce the paper on which they are reproduced, to cast shadows that render a three dimensional quality to the printed image. 


Over the course of four decades, advances in digital technology have enabled Silveira to expand her investigations into experimental printmaking to materialize in three dimension projects that she has envisioned since the early 1980s. Her use of media ranging from paper to immersive environments serve as sites to consistently transform perception through minimal intervention. Her transgressive visual language is defined 
by what she describes as “images with characteristics of aggregation and accumulation, with the power to cover surfaces and to function as graphic invasions or contaminations, which could radically transform the meanings 
of the…spaces where they were placed.”

Silveira has exhibited throughout Europe and the Americas, including recent solo exhibitions at Museu Oscar Niemeyer, Curitiba, Brazil (2015); Museu Chácara do Céu, Museus Castro Maya, Sta Teresa, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2015); Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico (2014); The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2012); Iberê Camargo Foundation, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2011); Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (2009); the Køge Museum of Art in Public Spaces, Denmark (2009); Museo de Antioquia, Medellín, Colombia (2008); Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, Bogotá, Colombia (2007); Palacio de Cristal, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain (2005); Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Brazil (2004). Her work is represented in public collections internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Miami Art Museum, FL; San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan; Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Argentina; Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Brazil; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil; and Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The Brazilian Art Critics Association gave her the Award for Life and Work in 2012. Silveira received Prêmio Governador do Estado de São Paulo and the MASP- Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand Award for Career, accompanied by an exhibition, in 2013.