On March 16, the first solo exhibition of Ascânio MMM will open at the gallery, opening our 2023 exhibition calendar. With a critical text by Diego Matos, the show will display 7 of the artist’s unpublished works – six wall works and one large sculpture – that contemplate his most recent artistic production.

One of the series included in the exhibition is “Quacors” – a neologism created by the artist created by the artist that unites the words square and color. We are faced with hybrids of sculptures and paintings. Part of Ascanio’s long research into the possibilities of aluminum, the “Quacors” emerge as a kind of block in which a succession of square modules – sometimes hollow, sometimes filled – are articulated by screws endowed with a certain looseness, in such a way that the compositions are tense and fluid at the same time.

In five decades dedicated to sculpture, Ascanio has built a meticulous work – transparent in its poetics and transparent in its poetics and firm in its constructive logic – that guarantees him a historical place in the trajectory of geometric abstraction in Latin America. This was his exclusive praxis. Ascânio never made a figurative work. The artist’s particular genesis is anchored in his Portuguese origin and in the Brazilian cultural context, more specifically that of Rio de Janeiro, a city fecundated by the neo-concretist revolution and its unfoldings.

Born in Fão, Portugal, in 1941, he has lived and worked in Rio de Janeiro since 1959.
His education includes time at the National School of Fine Arts between 1963 and 1964, and at the School of Architecture and Urbanism of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (FAU/UFRJ) between 1965 and 1969, where he graduated. He worked as an architect until 1976.

He began to develop his artistic work in 1966 while still at FAU and later in later on in parallel with his practice as an architect. Ascânio’s artistic production was the subject of a study and critical analysis by Paulo Herkenhoff in the book Ascânio MMM: Poética da Razão (BE? Editora, 2012). In 2005 the book Ascânio MMM (Editora Andrea Jakobsson, 2005) was published, with texts by Paulo Sergio Duarte, Lauro Cavalcanti, Fernando Cocchiarale and Marcio Doctors.