Selected by Oliver Basciano, editor-at-large, ArtReview
The ostrich looks like it got flattened by a truck, its beak half open in exclamation and head folded flush to the murky pink body. Yet it remains standing, perched atop a pair of three-dimensional bronze legs. The bird is one of the sculptural ZOO Animais e ornamentos (2024) Marina Woisky has on show in Mil graus [A thousand degrees], the 2024 edition of Panorama, the annual survey of Brazilian art organised by the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo. The pancake appearance of its body comes from the fact this is a digital image of a ostrich that, like the rest of Woisky’s beasts, has been printed on textile, which has in turn has been stuffed with wet – and now set – concrete. The result is a disconcerting interplay between reproduction and reality, mediated image and tactile object. It’s an exchange played out in sculptures ranging from a cormorant to a horse. The image of each is distorted by the resolution of the print, by the crinkles of the fabric, by the concrete filling; sculptural simulacra of the natural world.
The curators of Panorama, who have it tough with the broadness of the assignment, did a good job at picking out the issues preoccupying artists from Amazonas to Rio Grande do Sul; but Woisky’s sculptures felt odder than the rest, less prescribed to a particular thematic or politics, less easily slotted into being about one subject or another. The work touches on ecology of course: the animals do not appear particularly lively, the sculptures like deathmasks or mere husks of a menagerie, aspects that might draw attention to humanmade environmental destruction or to questions of hierarchical speciesism and interdependence. Yet Woisky brings the work beyond mere polemic through her formal considerations: the concrete and bronze, fabric and print appear both harmonious and confrontational (we see this affirmed in the more abstract geology-inflected wall works of a recent solo show at LUPO in Milan). Each work demonstrates a strong dialogue with both classical sculpture, the culture of kitsch objet d’art beloved in São Paulo’s junkshops and the dematerialised screen-based world. The ostrich gives us a lot to unpack.
In her commentary on technology and mediation, Woisky is working in a lineage of artists such as Briton Anthea Hamilton or Estonian Katja Novitskova (the latter similarly partial to a horse jpeg), but in reality the sheer breadth of the Brazilian’s quotations – in imagery, materially and socially – makes me want to draw a line between Woisky and The Pictures Generation, especially when that twentieth-century vogue of visual magpieing met the European high conceptualism of Isa Genzken’s assemblages or Rosemarie Trockel’s grotesqueries. Woisky shares a discombobulating weirdness with those older artists, some cyborgian tendency to combine disparate materials. In Woisky’s work, however, we see that brought to Brazil, a country in which the natural world is integral to the national identity, but which today is as famous for its turbocharged social-media culture. The artist’s fauna lives in a context in which the line between real space and platform space is eroded; collapsing as the natural habitat collapses; each beast a harbinger of doom.
Marina Woisky is an artist based in São Paulo whose work straddles the boundaries between photography, painting and sculpture. Woisky obtained her BFA from the Instituto de Artes at São Paulo State University in 2021. Her exhibition Through the Garden Bars was on view at LUPO, Milan, through 15 January.
