Sculpture

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ANA MARIA PACHECO Sculpture

PRATT CONTEMPORARY

The Gallery, Ightham, Sevenoaks, Kent TN15 9HH, England

Telephone +44 (0) 1732 882326 pca@prattcontemporaryart.co.uk www.prattcontemporaryart.co.uk

Introduction and texts Robert Bush © 2012

Photography © Pratt Contemporary Colin M. Harvey, John Slater, Pratt Contemporary

Second Edition Pratt Contemporary © 2013

Introduction

Ana Maria Pacheco has been sculpting now for fifty years. To critical and popular acclaim she has exhibited in group shows across the world and has had notable one-person shows in many cities including New York, Boston, Miami, Dakar, São Paulo and London. A signal honour was her appointment as the first non-European Associate Artist at the National Gallery, London in 1996. As early as 1991 John McEwen, then art critic of the The Sunday Telegraph, said that she was “...as powerful a figurative artist as we have seen in this country.”

Prime among the distinguishing features of Pacheco’s work that contribute to this power is the relationship of viewer to sculpture. She encourages viewers to go close to her figures and exploits the respective scale of each to challenge the viewer’s physical and moral equilibrium. By getting close up the viewer is also struck by the vivid presence of the figures and the consummate craftsmanship with which they are made.

Each of Pacheco’s major sculptures creates its own environment. The figures perform the dramas of the human condition, as Helen Boorman observes, in “a magical space with echoes of church, street corner and theatre...” Their gestures and postures, actions and interactions are shot through with ambiguity, expressed in a range of polarities: evil/goodness; suffering/redemption; force/compassion; anguish/irony; cruelty/humour; strength/vulnerability.

Ian Starsmore captures the various fusions of which her work is the product: it “is evolved from a tradition of making which lies between South American and European culture...It draws on medieval art, expressionist language, Catholic ritual, Renaissance art and classical mythology... [it] belongs to the present, but has its sources also in the continuum of scholarship, craft, mythology, narrative and history that individuals between cultures are often so able to discover and maintain.”

Robert Bush

References Boorman, H., Ana Maria Pacheco. Catalogue from Artsite, Bath, 1989.

McEwen, J., 1991. The human comedy in a vivid new dress. The Sunday Telegraph, 29 Dec. Starsmore, I., 2004, Collected Essays, Texts on the work of Ana Maria Pacheco, Pratt Contemporary Art.

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Shadows of the Wanderer

Polychromed wood, wood and steel base (2008) 260 x 390 x 605 cm

Photo: Aldeburgh Festival, 2008

Pacheco says that while working on Land of No Return, an image came into her mind of a young man carrying an old man on his shoulders. She was familiar with scenes in Vergil’s ‘Aeneid’ where the Trojan Prince Aeneas leads a band of refugees from the ruins of Troy, carrying his father on his back. This, and daily media images of similar suffering, led to the two front figures, sculpted from one piece of wood.

During an interval of years Pacheco experimented with various ways of grouping the background figures, finally settling on the form we see now. Ten larger than life-size presences robed in black loom as the shadows of the work’s title. Like a Greek chorus they observe the men’s plight with a variety of emotions, vigilant but seemingly incapable of intervening.

The forward movement of the piece, conveyed by the young man’s dogged advance and the old man’s gaze into the distance, creates a sense that the two protagonists are about to leave their world and enter ours, while yet another world is suggested by the shadowy space beneath the stage.

In 2012 Shadows of the Wanderer was exhibited at The First Kyiv International Biennale of Contemporary Art , which examined the major themes of contemporary art from across the world.

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Land of No Return

Polychromed wood, gold leaf, slate base (2002) 193 x 540 x 660 cm Private collection

Photo: Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, 2004

On one side, three naked men adopt aggressive gestures and postures, but for all their belligerence their very nakedness conveys a strong sense of vulnerability. On the other side, three clothed women are casting golden cowrie shells in a form of ritual divination. Between these two groups stands a young woman in a white dress and gold sandals, seeming to hesitate, wondering which way to go.

The kneeling male is based on the figure at the foot of Giambologna’s ‘The Rape of the Sabines’. This is not simply homage paid to an admired sculptor but is, more importantly, a deliberate and subversive use of the language of the Baroque, brought by European colonisers to South America. In fact Pacheco deploys the language throughout the piece and it is evident in more naturalistic human forms and a greater sense of movement than usual. Pacheco’s prints and drawings leading up to the sculpture explore aspects of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the tale of a man-god’s quest for immortality that has fascinated Pacheco since childhood and informs this work.

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Memória Roubada I

Polychromed wood, gold leaf, slate base (2001) 200 x 300 x 300 cm

Photo: Morning Chapel, Salisbury Cathedral, 2012

Memória Roubada - Stolen Memory. A cabinet contains six disembodied heads that focus in a range of expressions on the pierced heart before them. Images of the Seven Sorrows of Mary, which gained currency in the Counter Reformation, show seven swords, each representing a sorrow that pierces Mary’s heart. Here, swords are replaced by daggers with all their connotations of violent betrayal.

The cabinet recalls the Portuguese oratorio, a domestic devotional altar containing items associated with a saint, sometimes with prayers inscribed. On the doors of this ‘oratorio’ is a quotation from a contemporary Brazilian poem describing the fate of the victims of colonisation, robbed of their memory:

OLHOS VAZADOS

Poked eyes

SEXOS CASTRADOS

Castrated sexes

CHUMBO NOS OUVIDOS

Shot in the ears

MÃOS ARRANCADAS

Severed hands

José Lobo

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Memória Roubada II

Polychromed wood, gold leaf, slate base (2008) 207 x 240 x 300 cm

Photo: All Hallows on the Wall, London, 2008

It had been Pacheco’s intention from the outset to have a companion piece to Memória Roubada I of 2001 but other projects intervened. In 2008, however, Memória Roubada II was completed and the two pieces were shown together in All Hallows on the Wall, London. In contrast to the emotional display of the first piece, here the heads stare resolutely forward, heedless of the silver shell (an ambiguous emblem – of renewal? exploitation?) on the ground before them. The faces have the fathomless impassivity of identity photographs of Auschwitz detainees. The text engraved in the slate base is part of the last will and testament of Isabella de Castile in which she expresses her wish for the inhabitants of the New World.

. . . Y NO CONSIENTAN NI DEN LUGAR QUE LOS INDIOS VECINOS E MORADORES DE LAS DICHAS ISLAS E TIERRA FIRME, GANADAS E POR GANAR, RECIBAN AGRAVIO ALGUNO EN SUS PERSONAS NI BIENES, MAS MANDEN QUE SEAN BIEN Y JUSTAMENTE TRATADOS.

. . . And do not consent or allow the Indians who live on the said islands and mainland, whether already in our possession or to be won in

the future, to suffer any offence to their person or their goods, but see to it that they are well and justly treated.

Isabella de Castile, 1504

Memória Roubada II is the most overtly historical meditation on the consequences of colonisation in all of Pacheco’s sculpted work.

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Dark Night of the Soul

Polychromed wood, gold leaf, slate base (1999) 228.6 x 540 x 660 cm

Photo: National Gallery, London, 1999

Pacheco was Associate Artist at the National Gallery, London from 1997 to 2000. Her brief was to produce a work for exhibition, inspired in some way by the National Gallery collection. The nineteen-figure installation Dark Night of the Soul was the result. Apart from its immense scale and variety of poses, the piece is unusual for its radial structure. The focus is a central group where a kneeling, naked, hooded figure, pierced by arrows, is hedged round by four huge enforcers.

This hooded figure is directly linked to a young child in that they are the only naked figures in the piece and are also on a sightline. Other small groups look on in dismay or compassion at the central event, while hoodlums on the outskirts are engrossed in their own feuding.

Pacheco admired the National Gallery’s ‘The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian’ by Piero del Pollaiuolo and her sculpture clearly takes as its starting point the Romans’ punishment of Sebastian for his conversion to Christianity. She felt that by giving her work a title referring to that particular event, she would close the reading and viewers would not then take time to explore its wider implications. The title does in fact have a religious origin. It is the title of a poem and commentary by St John of the Cross which describes the journey of his soul towards unity with God. Wider implications of the sculpture became evident when photographs of atrocities in Abu Ghraib prison appeared in newspapers in strikingly similar images.

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The Longest Journey

Polychromed wood, gold leaf (1994) 320 x 335 x 975 cm

Photo: North Transept, Salisbury Cathedral, 2012

The title of this piece comes from D H Lawrence’s poem The Ship of Death:

Build then the ship of death, for you must take The longest journey, to oblivion...

Ten figures are adrift on a boat without power or crew. Four young adults voyage in states of contemplation, wonder and anxiety, while five large white-robed figures in the prow are more watchful of the boat’s course and its passengers. A young trouserless child takes keenest interest of all, a lookout precariously perched on a stool amidships, linking the two groups. Where is this 32 foot Broads cruiser headed? Is the longest journey one that we all undertake? Are the shrouded figures our guides to an unknown realm?

The Longest Journey was the centrepiece of a large show of Pacheco’s work in The Gas Hall, Birmingham in 1994 and was shown again in the North Transept of Salisbury Cathedral in 2012. Pacheco had been exploring the theme of the journey as early as 1987 in two drypoints, The Longest Journey I & II. In 1994 she produced a series of ten drypoints, Terra Ignota, where boats carrying their bewildered passengers are stranded on stilts or swing in mid-air. One other print from 1994, The Dark Night of the Soul, enters the siren-tormented world of Odysseus.

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Study of Head ( John the Baptist III)

Polychromed wood (1992) 31.8 x 50.8 x 74 cm Private collection

Photo: All Hallows on the Wall, London, 2008

The disembodied head, human and animal, is a constant subject in all forms of Pacheco’s work. There are two types: heads that have been severed from the body, and heads that exist as independent entities, as in Memória Roubada I, for instance. Traces of a neck and the dulled state of the eyes, as in this work, tend to distinguish the former from the latter. Pacheco did two large charcoal drawings at about this time, Beheaded (Judith) and Beheaded (Salome), in which she “circumnavigates” aspects of the subject and the theme.

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Man and His Sheep

Polychromed Wood, Jura Marble base (1989) 200 x 450 x 400 cm Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery Collection

Pacheco completed Man and His Sheep after her four year spell as Head of Fine Art at Norwich School of Art. As in some of her other works, the imagery combines pagan and religious elements, here in the suggestion of shaman/shepherd in the semi-naked figure. Prints and drawings leading up to the sculpture show constant revisions of the relationship between the leader, the group and the sheep’s head. The leader in most of these is oppressor of the group (in one he confines them in a pen and squats on them). The group, despite the protests of some members, are victims of the leader’s whim; and the sheep’s head (in one case an ox’s skull) represents the remains of a sacrifice. The final sculpture is by no means so clear-cut. The leader now looks burdened and uneasy. The postures and expressions of the group show a variety of responses to him and whatever acts he has perpetrated, but they are not submissive. The steadiest gaze in the entire piece comes from the sheep’s head, which seems to radiate a power of its own. Man and His Sheep was the first of Pacheco’s sculptures to be exhibited in a church, St John’s Catholic Church, Bath in 1989.

As with other works, Pacheco encouraged viewers to walk among the figures and get to know them face to face. In this piece she was more interested than hitherto in the garments the figures wear. After blocking out the main shapes in the logs, she set them on fire. Having doused them she then made rough cuts with a chainsaw to suggest folds and hair, softened by the effects of burning. Pacheco exploited the chanced-on image of smoke billowing from the burning figures in subsequent paintings, prints and drawings.

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Some Exercise of Power

Triptych (1980-85) left to right: The Banquet | Acrobats | Some Exercise of Power

Photo: Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, 2005

Some Exercise of Power is the title of a three-figure sculpture that gave its name to the triptych which also includes The Banquet (1985) and Acrobats (1983).

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The Banquet

Polychromed wood (1985) 183 x 400 x 250 cm (dims vary)

Photo: Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, 2005

Pacheco had made a small bronze study of a banquet scene while still in Brazil, but she was not satisfied with it. Some twenty years later she felt ready to tackle the subject again. This, the third piece of the triptych, Some Exercise of Power, was completed in 1985.

Pacheco had the Banquet installed for some time in her Norfolk studio and observed people closely as they looked at it. Always they went to the same spot opposite the large figure that looks out across the table. The viewer takes his or her place as fifth guest at the table, or next item on the menu. The piece is suggestive of both pagan and Christian ritual.

Most of Pacheco’s figures, while recognisably human, are distortions of the human form. Their very lack of naturalism makes them, paradoxically, more real. The diners here are huge. When you stand opposite these seated figures you are at their eye level. You engage with them on their terms. The oversized domed heads and body proportions of several early Pacheco figures make them resemble children as much as adults, which lends an even more sinister aspect to the fearful things we see enacted.

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Acrobats

Polychromed wood (1983) 340 x 390 x 193 cm

Photo: Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, 2005

The second of Pacheco’s Some Exercise of Power triptych, Acrobats, was completed in 1983. Her earlier sculptures had more or less descriptive titles but her interest in the possibility of verbal language to come at a slant to the visual image led her to experiment. The two figures are clearly in the sort of positions acrobats get themselves into and they are wearing striped trunks from the world of showbiz but the rope, for one thing, and the scaffold, for another, don’t fit that kind of picture and the expressions of the performers leave room for more traumatic interpretations.

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Some Exercise of Power

Polychromed wood, York Stone base (1980) 180 x 280 x 183 cm (dims vary)

Photo: Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, 2005

Some Exercise of Power was Pacheco’s first major multi-figure sculpture since leaving her native Brazil (then under military rule since 1964), and coming to England in 1973. It was shown in 1980 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London as part of a national exhibition entitled Women’s Images of Men.

In sculptures made in Brazil and during her first years in Britain, Pacheco had taken as the main focus of her work the relationship of human and landscape forms.

This piece marks her first engagement with issues of politics and power. Several characteristics of Pacheco’s later sculpture are already apparent here: polished stone eyes that animate individual figures and through their gazes create force fields between them; prosthetic teeth whose arrangements defy orthodontics but are all the more expressive for that; the combination of the sculpted and the real - ropes, old doors, nails - a characteristic of Baroque sculpture; and, perhaps most importantly, the positioning of figures on the ground so that viewers encounter them not simply as figures from art.

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The Three Graces (Figure I)

Polychromed wood (1983), detail 128.3 x 213.4 x 152.4 cm Private collection

The subject of the three daughters of Zeus has a long history in western art, famously sculpted by Canova and painted by Raphael, Rubens and Cranach among many others. All have delighted in the figures’ sinuous charms. Pacheco’s version portrays three generations of women, the oldest standing on a platform studded with nails (Figure III), another lying prone on a mattress (Figure II) and the youngest (opposite) sitting on a two-seater bench, the space beside her occupied by a massive, embedded iron nail.

Unusually in Pacheco’s practice she produced a suite of drypoints with the same title after the sculpture. The menacing presences that are suggested symbolically in her sculpture are shown more explicitly in the prints.

With hindsight one can see intertextual dimensions at play in Pacheco’s work. The prone naked man on the table of The Banquet is an echo of the prone naked woman on the mattress here. Does his fate await her?

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The Three Graces (Figure II)

Polychromed wood (1983) 58 x 200 x 184 cm

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The Three Graces (Figure III)

Polychromed wood (1983) 195 x 170 x 123 cm Wolverhampton Art Gallery Collection

Photo: Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 1983

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Brief Biography

1960-64

BA in Sculpture and BA in Music

1965

Postgraduate Course in Music and Education

1966-73

University Lecturer

1973-75

British Council Scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art, London

1985-89

Head of Fine Art, Norwich School of Art, Norfolk

1996

Appointed Fourth Associate Artist at the National Gallery, London (1997-2000)

1999

Awarded the Ordem do Rio Branco by the Brazilian Government

2000

Honorary Degree from the University of East Anglia

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Honorary Degree from Anglia Polytechnic University

2003

Made Fellow of University College London

Ana Maria Pacheco was born in Brazil. Following degrees in both art and music - at the Pontifical Catholic University of Goiás and the Federal University of Goiás - she went on to complete a postgraduate course in music and education at the Federal University of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro. She taught and lectured for several years at the Pontifical Catholic University of Goiás and the Federal University of Goiás before leaving for London in 1973 on a British Council Scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art. Since 1973 she has lived and worked in England. She has dedicated a number of years to education, as Head of Fine Art at Norwich School of Art and as an external assessor and visiting lecturer to a number of art schools in London and throughout the UK. She has also been a member of several educational boards. From 1997 to 2000 she was Associate Artist at the National Gallery, London. She was both the first non-European and the first sculptor to take up this appointment, which culminated in a major exhibition of her work.

One person exhibitions include: St Albert’s Catholic Chaplaincy, Edinburgh (Edinburgh Art Festival 2013); Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil; Salisbury Cathedral (Ageas Salisbury International Festival of the Arts 2012); University of Kent at Canterbury; St John’s Church Waterloo, London; Wallspace, All Hallows on the Wall, London; Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts, Aldeburgh, Suffolk; Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, Massachusetts, USA; Victoria Art Gallery, Bath; Brighton Museum & Art Gallery; Hayward Touring (Prints); Kilkenny Arts Festival, Kilkenny, Ireland; National Gallery, London (touring); Wolverhampton Art Gallery; Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Trout Gallery, Dickinson College, Pennsylvania, USA; Cass Sculpture Foundation, Chichester; The Gas Hall, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery; Norwich Castle Museum; Oslo Kunstforening, Norway; Trondhjems Kunstforening, Norway; Winchester Cathedral; Cornerhouse, Manchester; Artsite Gallery, Bath (touring); St John’s Catholic Church, Bath; Worcester Cathedral; Worcester City Art Gallery; Museum of Modern Art, Oxford; Camden Arts Centre, London; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.

Group exhibitions include: ‘Witches and Wicked Bodies’, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two), Edinburgh; ARSENALE 2012 , The First Kyiv International Biennale of Contemporary Art, Mystetskyi Arsenal, Ukraine; ‘Heiliger Sebastian: A Splendid Readiness for Death’, Kunsthalle Wien, Austria; ‘Fråvær/Absences’, a touring exhibition in Norway, organised by National Touring Exhibitions, Norway; ‘The Human Condition – The Figure in British Art 1950-2002’, Waterhall Gallery of Modern Art, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery; Dakar Biennale, Senegal, West Africa; ‘Queen of Sheba: Treasures from Ancient Yemen’, British Museum, London; ‘Human Interest’, Cornerhouse, Manchester; Hayward Annual, London; ‘Women’s Images of Men’, ICA London; Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo, Brazil; São Paulo Biennale, Brazil.

Public collections include: British Museum; British Library; British Council; Arts Council England; Government Art Collection; Tate Gallery; Victoria & Albert Museum; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery; Wolverhampton Art Gallery; South East Arts Collection; Norwich Castle Museum; Cass Sculpture Foundation, Chichester; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; Pallant House, Chichester; Linacre College, University of Oxford; Itaú Cultural, São Paulo, Brazil; Ackland Art Museum, North Carolina, USA; New York Public Library, USA; Cincinnati Art Museum, USA; Sweet Briar College, Virginia, USA; Portland Art Museum, Oregon, USA; Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, USA; Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig, Germany; Trondhjems Kunstforening, Trondheim, Norway; Museum of Contemporary Art, Fredrikstad, Norway.

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