Renowned for his sculptural paintings assembled from objects resembling crates, porticos and window frames, this new body of work is a continuation of Sergio Sister’s extensive career with roots in abstraction, minimalism, and permutations of the ready-made. Sister’s work can be viewed as an extension of minimalism in the United States, the Arte Povera movement of the 1960s in Europe, and the Neo-Concrete movement of the 1960s in Brazil. Playing with scale and subtle variation, Sister’s intimate paintings have layers of opaque color that conceal a symbiotic color from beneath. Gestural brushstrokes and layers of pigment generate luminous vibrations of texture that convey both emergence and disappearance across the surface of the canvas. Sérgio Sister was born in São Paulo in 1948, where he currently lives and works. Sister studied painting at the Armando Álvares Penteado Foundation in São Paulo in the 1960s. He undertook graduate studies in social sciences and post-graduate studies in political science at the University of São Paulo. In 1970, he was arrested for protesting the military regime and detained for 19 months at the Tiradentes Prison in São Paulo. Sister attended painting workshops held at the institution. In 2002, the monograph Sérgio Sister was published by the editions Casa da imagem, with essays by Alberto Tassinari, Lorenzo Mammì and Rodrigo Naves. His work has been shown extensively throughout Brazil and is included in major public collections such as the Museu de Arte Moderna, the Pinacoteca do Estado in São Paulo and the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro. His early drawings were included in an exhibition at the Drawing Center, New York in 2019.
[excerpted from Bienvenu Steinberg & J website: www.bsandj.com]
