Isabel Amado Fotografia & Luciana Brito Galeria
[Luciana Brito Galeria]
October 16, 2021 – January 29, 2022
Gertrudes Altschul played a pioneering role in the consolidation of modern photography in Brazil. In the lead up to the 60th anniversary of her death (1962), Luciana Brito Galeria, in a joint effort with Isabel Amado Fotografia, the exclusive representative of the artist’s works, is presenting the show Gertrudes Altschul: Pequenos Formatos [Gertrudes Altschul: Small Formats], as part of its Visiting Artist program. The artist is currently being recognized by two exhibitions at eminent museums: one at the Museum of Modern Art of New York (MoMA-NY), Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946–1964, and the other at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Filigrana [Filigree], the largest solo show ever held about her work. For its part, the show Pequenos Formatos features more than 35 small original vintage prints by the artist, made between 1948 in 1960, which were recently discovered by the family and are shown here for the first time. The exhibition presents a panorama that conveys the relevance of the artist’s production while engaging in direct dialogue with the modernist architecture of the former residence designed by Rino Levi.
From a Jewish background, fleeing the Nazi regime and German anti-Semitism, Gertrudes Altschul disembarked in Brazil with her family to set up residence in São Paulo, in 1939. From then onward, photography became an integral part of the artist’s life, whether for recording her everyday experience, or to help in creating the production molds for the family’s factory, which made ornamental flowers for hats and other decorative purposes. In the late 1940s, Gertrudes Altschul approached the Foto Cineclube Bandeirante, which was the epicenter for the leading lights of modern photography in Brazil, becoming one of the few female members. Together with Geraldo de Barros, German Lorca and Thomaz Farkas, the artist then began to practice photography in keeping with the experimental investigations of the São Paulo School of Photography, thinking of and using photography as a medium for artistic expression.
With innate artistic sensibilities, Gertrudes Altschul was adept at combining elements into a connected whole, whether in the capture of the object in her gaze, or by her skill at editing, which became a determinant process in the dynamics of her creation and production. Based on photographs made with a Rolleiflex camera, whose large negatives were better suited to experimentation, the artist already defined a specific rectangular framing based on the camera’s original 6 x 6 cm square film frame. It was through the manipulation of the angles that she managed to select what most interested her and to accentuate the graphic aspects of the image. Gertrudes Altschul was also adept at using the photogram technique, in which objects are positioned directly over the photographic paper and project their shapes onto it in ways that allow for the maximum exploration of their original forms, producing results that can also be seen at the exhibition.
In her production, the city of São Paulo – then in a phase of rapid geographical, economic and cultural growth – became the perfect scenario for photographic experiments, through a particular interest for modern industrial architecture, which was undergoing an intense process of verticalization with new real-estate developments. In photographing the city’s architecture and urban spaces, Gertrudes Altschul used vantage points, angles and framings that highlight their details and transform the referent into geometric abstraction. The work Concreto Abstrato [Abstract Concrete], featured in the exhibition, is considered one of the key works of modern photography in Brazil, and is a good example of the deconstruction of the object based on tight framing, re-signifying it within the constructivist aesthetic, then in vogue in Brazil during the 1950s.
Another striking aspect in her research, and unique among the modernist concept of that time, was the use of natural foliage and botanical motifs in her experiments with photography. The organic and geometric patterns typical of Brazilian vegetation attracted Gertrudes Altschul’s gaze, which empowered their natural qualities and geometric patterns through the dramaticity of light and perspective. Regarding this concept, the work Filigrana [Filigree], featured in the exhibition, is among the ten most important photographs of modernity worldwide, according to the curator of MoMA-NY and North American researcher, Sarah Meister.
