Ana Maria Tavares
1958 —
Ana Maria Tavares
Belo Horizonte, 1958.
Ana Maria Tavares graduated from FAAP, did her masters in sculptures at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and studied Project Development at the Oxbow Art Center in Michigan. She defended her doctoral thesis at the School of Communication and Arts at USP (University of São Paulo) in 2000.
Ana Maria Tavares is acknowledged by her works inspired on the utopic modernist Brazilian architecture pieces. Modern spaces, such as airports, are recurrent themes on her work, as they serve as a symbolism to our day-to-day life exile, a place hanging between the real and virtual. Ana is often producing installations for national and international museums.
Her first solo show was at the Pinacoteca of the State in 1982. She took part of São Paulo’s Biennial in 1983, 1987, 1991, and the special edition of 1994, Brasil 20th Century Biennial. Amongst her group shows abroad we can highlight: “Modernité” at the Museum of Modern Art in paris, 1987, and “Ultramodern” at the National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington, USA, 1993. Between 2002 and 2003 she had a scholarship at the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, in New York. In 2006, she had the installation “Riddles of a night with Midnight Daydreams” at the Tomie Ohtake’s institute in São Paulo and Cingapura’s Biennial.
Amongst her latest solo shows that are worth mentioned we can find “Ana Maria Tavares: deviating utopias” at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville in 2013, “Atlantica Moderna: Purus e Negros” at the Vale Museum, in Vila Velha, Espirito Santo, Brazil, 2014 and “Cárcere duas vozes: Piranesi e Ana Maria Tavares” at the Lasar Segall Museum, São Paulo, 2015. In November 2016 she opened a grand retrospective at the Pinacoteca (the most important contemporary museum in the state of São Paulo), entitled “No lugar mesmo: uma antologia de Ana Maria Tavares”. This exhibition won the prize for best retrospective of the year by São Paulo Association of Art Critics.