JOHANNA CALLE: GRAFOS

One of the participant artist of the 31st Bienal de São Paulo, which opens in September, the Colombian artist Johanna Calle presents simultaneously the exhibition GRAFOS, her second individual at Galeria Marília Razuk. The artist brings four series of works – Submergentes, Balances, Minúsculas and Collages –which embraces themes, processes and materials adopted throughout the past years.

The series Submergentes, made of wire mesh on paper, shows distorced male figures computers, numbers, books and math calculations which remind of the fragility of economic system, with abstract ideas on structure and financial crisis.

Balances are a series of drawings that presents the line as a metaphor of equilibrium.By using procedures such as cutting, breaking and stretching, the artist deconstructs the original stability.

Minúsculas is a series of drawings on Japanese paper, where writing transforms into image,creating relations between text and figure. “The drawing is an open field for conventional methods, as well as experimental processes and new materials”, affirms Johanna, who finds an effective way of building images and forms, serving themselves as surface, materials and procedures uncommon to drawing.

In her works, Johanna creates meaningful linguistic and symbolic “abstractions” which often denotes vulnerability, fragility, precariousness, resistance and transgression. According to artist, the act of pitting out, erasing,subtracting, cutting or twisting, emphasizes the fact that some element is absent or that something has been destabilized. 

Johanna,who has participated of Bienal do Mercosul, in 2009, and of Istanbul Biennale in 2011, produces an art that is at the same time both delicate and bold, finding at the graphism a special way to reference problems and incoherencies that permeate the Latin American society. In the words of the Colombian curator José Ignacio Roca, the artist developed a serious and reflexive artwork that signalizes, very sharply, certain symptoms of social discomfort of which our country (Colombia) suffers for a very long time.

 About Johanna Calle

The artist was born in Bogota, Colombia, in 1965, where lives and works. After graduating at Universidad de los Andes (1984-1989), in Bogota, concluded her masters in Fine Arts at Chelsea College of Art, London (1992-1993). Among her individual shows are highlighted Project Room: Johanna Calle, at Molaa (Museum of Latin American Art, in Long Veach, CA, 2011) and Variaciones (Casa Riegner, Bogota, 2010). She is currently exhibiting at Fundação Gulbenkian, in Lisbon.