Ana Maria Tavares started to insert words in her works in 1997, but it was with the series Cityscape, especially made for the 50 years if São Paulo’s Biennial, in 2001, that the mantras were propelled in her work. At the time, Ana used 8 words and expressions printed in polished stainless steel sheets that together would form a large panel reflecting Ibirapuera’s Park.

For the show Forgotten Mantras, her second solo show at the gallery, Ana seeks all expressions and words she’s been using since 1997, in reference to the time that makes us forget about the past, making it necessary for us to go back to the mantras in order that they stay in us.
According to the artist, “The mantras serve as a summary of the current times, they work as passwords so we can get around the contemporary world” and it is because of this that now they have become even more complex, in various languages, marking the homogeneization and the repetition from one culture to another, all of them contaminated by the copy.

Besides the four pieces from the series Forgotten Mantras there is also an installation with smaller works engraved with mantras such as desire, delight, stillnox, lexotan, sexo; that can be assembled in various ways. All of them are made in polished stainless steel.
To break to hardness of the square mesh and the modernist reticule present in stainless steel works. Ana also included in the show the piece “Desire”, which is a print with layers of mantras, overlapped in many directions, in a reference to chaos.