MASP – förlag

The debut monograph on the Brazilian fotoclubismo photographerThis is the first monograph dedicated to the work of the trailblazing German Brazilian photographer Gertrudes Altschul (1904–62). Featuring an elegant uncoated paper cover with stamped lettering, it reproduces all 70 of the artist’s known vintage prints, exploring her main themes: modern Brazilian architecture, botanical motifs and still lifes. The volume includes a selection of the artist’s archival material, such as contact sheets.Of Jewish origin, Altschul migrated in 1939 from her hometown, Berlin, to Brazil with her husband, fleeing the Nazi regime. She settled in São Paulo, where she divided her time between photography and the production of flowers for hats in a factory run by the couple. Altschul was one of the few women to be part of the well-known Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante (FCCB) in São Paulo, an important group that brought together photographers aligned with modernist photography in Brazil.

The largest publication to date on the work of a pioneering Brazilian painterIone Saldanha (1919–2001) was a highly influential though underappreciated figure in the history of 20th-century Brazilian art. Her paintings on canvas and paper, as well as more unconventional surfaces such as wooden slats, spools and planks, depict the perpetual invention and reinvention of the city.

Articulating the ideas, colors and forms of the Pan-Africanist movement within a “Latin-Amefrican” imaginaryThis catalog documents the paintings of African-Brazilian scholar, artist, poet, dramatist and activist Abdias Nascimento (1914–2011), compiling around 70 works from his wide-ranging career.

“Paula’s beautiful, ambitious project illuminates forgotten histories, honoring the overlooked.” –Andrea K. Scott, The New YorkerThe Brazilian artist Dalton Paula (born 1982) works across painting, installation, photography and sculpture. Drawing on rigorous visual research, he seeks to critically interpret historical events, particularly as they have affected Black people in Brazil—a country that, after Nigeria, contains the second-largest population of African descent.Dalton Paula: Brazilian Portraits showcases a sampling from the portrait series Paula embarked on in 2018, a tribute to the Black Brazilian men and women who fought for freedom and justice over the course of several centuries but have been systematically erased from the country’s dominant historical narrative. Through his portraits (one of which—a gripping rendering of the Brazilian slave rebellion leader Zeferina—appears on the cover of the much-acclaimed 2021 volume Afro-Atlantic Histories), Paula provides much-needed dignity, visibility and recognition to these valorous figures.

A colossal panorama of Brazilian visual culture across five centuriesPublished for the bicentennial of Brazil’s independence, Brazilian Histories brings together a selection of more than 300 works and documents from different mediums, typologies and regions of the country, spanning the 16th to 21st centuries.

A long-overdue introduction to the Brazilian Concrete art protagonist and Grupo Ruptura memberBrazilian painter and printmaker Judith Lauand (born 1922) is regarded as a key figure of Concrete art. Lauand is the only woman to have participated in Grupo Ruptura, a collective of artists that pioneered Concretism in Brazil, which counted such luminaries as Waldemar Cordeiro, Luiz Sacilotto, Geraldo de Barros, Lotar Charoux and Anatol Wladyslaw among its ranks. Lauand, initially self-taught, moved to São Paulo in the 1950s and encountered Concrete art while working at the 2nd Bienal Internacional. She then quickly delved into the movement, holding a solo show within the same year.This survey follows Lauand’s tremendous oeuvre across five decades, paying particular attention to her engagement with the Concrete movement. The catalog cover is rendered in striking Concrete style, lined with squares and enclosed within a black slipcase dotted with geometric cutouts.

The first monograph for an influential indigenous Brazilian painterCarmézia Emiliano (born 1960) is a Macuxi painter and pioneering Indigenous figure on the contemporary Brazilian art scene. This volume accompanies her first solo exhibition, featuring recent canvases depicting landscapes, objects of material culture and the daily life of her community.

Otherness and exploitation in the fraught oeuvre of Post-Impressionism's canonical painterThis book accompanies the first exhibition to investigate Paul Gauguin’s (1848–1903) relationship with the question of alterity and the exoticizing of otherness in his paintings. Adopting an engagingly critical tone, Paul Gauguin: The Other and I deals with central questions within the celebrated Post-Impressionist’s oeuvre, focusing on both his self-portraits and his works produced in Tahiti.Alongside reproductions of relevant works, the book also features essays that examine the tensions between Gauguin’s biography and the image that the artist assiduously created of himself, as well as the way in which his oeuvre reinforced an imaginary about otherness, addressing crucial and current issues such as the notion of primitivism, the "exotic" and the "tropics," and cultural appropriation, as well as matters related to the erotization of the female body, sexuality and androgyny.

An indigenous Yanomami artist translates the body art of his community into paper-based worksSheroanawe Hakihiiwe (born 1971) is an Indigenous Yanomami artist from the Venezuelan Amazon. His practice consists of minimal and abstract drawings inspired by the body paintings of his community, which he began producing in the 1990s after learning to make paper using native fibers.

A sweeping look at the history of the artist collective whose graphic poster designs helped define the visual culture of AIDS activismGran Fury (1988–95) was a New York–based activist artist collective that emerged from ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), an organization founded in 1987 to raise awareness about the HIV/AIDS crisis in the United States through political activism. Named for the vehicle favored by the New York City police, Gran Fury formed to summon a sense of collective indignation. The collective’s innovative graphic design campaigns were mobilized in ACT UP demonstrations to awaken the public to the disdain, neglect and silence of Ronald Reagan’s administration during the epidemic. The group produced posters, newspapers, stickers, photographs, videos and billboards that were circulated to transform perceptions about HIV/AIDS, interrogate ineffective public policies and underreported government data, interrupt misconceptions disseminated by the media, confront the morality of religious institutions, and alleviate the stigma and discrimination faced by people living with HIV/AIDS. They worked closely with other activist groups, including the Silence=Death Project, whose posters featuring a pink triangle came to be a defining visual of the AIDS crisis.This richly illustrated catalog is a comprehensive survey of the collective’s body of work. It includes unpublished essays, historical interviews, rare pamphlets, photographs and ephemera that altogether chart the development of a new visual language for effecting social change. Gran Fury: Art Is Not Enough is an indispensable reference for the study of the intersection of activism and the arts in the late 20th century.

Using the painter’s queer identity as a framework to understand his visceral approach to figurationFrancis Bacon is considered one of the most important artists of the 20th century, best known for his distinctive way of portraying human figures. Especially in his male portraits and nudes, the physicality of the body—skin, flesh, muscles—is translated by the artist into thick, oily textures, giving the figures almost abstract shapes. Flashes of teeth, torsos and rib cages underscore Bacon’s visceral philosophy regarding the human form. As the artist famously said: “We are meat, we are potential carcasses. If I go into a butcher’s shop I always think it is surprising that I wasn’t there instead of the animal.”Beyond their carnal overtones, these paintings unite a wide variety of influences, revisiting canonical themes and combining references to the great masters of painting with Bacon’s own perceptions of the male body. Both his biography and oeuvre were permeated by the presence of his lovers, with whom he established intense and turbulent relationships. Francis Bacon: The Beauty of Meat accompanies the 2024 exhibition at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, exploring the queer aspects of the artist's work and highlighting how Bacon, with his innovative and impactful painting, paved the way for queer presence in visual culture.Born in Ireland, British painter Francis Bacon (1909–92) worked in furniture design and interior decoration until 1945, when his career as a painter took off. He enjoyed colossal success in his lifetime, especially as part of a London cohort that included such contemporaries as Lucian Freud and John Deakin.

Reassessing the legacy of a Brazilian Modernist exponent and his debated sexualityThis richly illustrated catalog envisions an image of Mário de Andrade (1893–1945) that goes beyond the renowned writer by spotlighting his personal collection of Brazilian art and his amateur travel photographs, viewed anew through a queer gaze.

Castro’s intimate, small-scale works confront the disenfranchisement of racial and gender minoritiesThrough paintings, engravings, objects, photographs and drawings, Brazilian artist Lia D Castro (born 1978) uses sex work to investigate how race, class and gender dynamics play roles in situations of vulnerability and intimacy, and how affection and care can be tools for social transformation. The title of the book highlights a historical condition imposed on the so-called "racial and gender minorities": often seen as a majority at the very bases of our societies, while widely absent from decision-making positions. D Castro invites us to think critically on how racialized and gendered bodies could occupy positions of power in a system that profits from their exclusion. The book includes reproductions of works spanning the artist’s career, as well as commissioned essays by Ana Raylander Martís dos Anjos, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Tie Jojima.

Nearly four decades of work from the photographer who redefined the expression of gender in contemporary queer portraitureA leading voice in contemporary photography, Catherine Opie has been known for her portraits of the queer scene in California since the late 1980s. A fundamental element of Opie’s work is the observation of different gender performances through a critical revision of the genre of portraiture. Her photography emphasizes how portraiture has the power to both reinforce and deconstruct conventional and binary expressions of gender. The title of this publication and the MASP exhibition it accompanies is based on the double meaning of the word gênero in Portuguese, meaning both “gender” and “genre.”For her first solo show in Brazil, Opie enters into dialogue with the tradition of the portrait—a way of representing the human figure that dates to the 15th century in the West—producing an archive of diverse presentations of gender and sexuality. Around 60 photographs from her most iconic series are displayed alongside a selection of around 15 emblematic portraits from MASP’s collection. Strongly marked by figuration and the formal constraint of portraiture, the juxtaposition of these works accentuates the dialogues, tensions and reformulations that Opie’s photographic oeuvre proposes.Catherine Opie was born in Ohio in 1961 and is currently a professor of photography and the chair of the art department at UCLA. Opie’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe and Japan. She has had solo exhibitions of her work at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; St. Louis Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among many others.

The first book to examine Monet's landscapes as ecological systems and intricate microcosms of nature and societyKnown almost as much for his gardens as for his paintings, the Impressionist Claude Monet (1840–1926) held a fascination with nature that only deepened as his career progressed. Monet's Ecology is the first exhibition to investigate the artist's relationship to ecology and the environment. Illustrated with a dazzling array of landscapes, from his early coastal views of Le Havre to his "impressions" of Westminster Bridge and Gare Saint-Lazare, his Rouen Cathedral series and finally Water Lilies, each curatorial essay in the catalog examines a different aspect of Monet's "ecologies"—from the industrial biomes of London and Paris to the pastoralism of middle-class leisure and contemporary protests against climate change that directly invoke Monet's Giverny scenes—arguing that Monet's radical engagement with the natural world positioned him at the forefront of ecological awareness.

Blending formal rigor with stringent activism, Krajcberg's six-decade-long oeuvre centers his deep connection to nature and his advocacy for the Amazon rainforestsA pioneer in the integration of art and ecology, Polish Brazilian artist Frans Krajcberg (1921–2017) was a trailblazer in raising visibility around environmental issues, working with remnants of tree trunks, vines and charred wood, denouncing forest fires and the violence of extractivism.

Queer activism meets grassroots printing and Latin American identity in this typographic celebration of resistanceFormed in 2007, the Buenos Aires–based collective Serigrafistas Queer employs accessible graphic printing techniques with slogans applied to pieces of paper and strips of fabric. This bright and stylish introduction to their work reproduces 62 works, together with fanzines, visual records and a portable manual on screenprinting.

Vernacular textiles as rallying call: 47 arpilleras from Brazilian women that advocate for collective construction of state infrastructureArpilleras, colorful patchwork pieces made of scraps of fabric embroidered on jute, originated in Chile in the 1960s as an expression of female protagonism during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. In subsequent years, the vernacular art form has spread across the globe, inspiring activist groups such as the National Women's Collective of the Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens (Movement of People Affected by Dams, or MAB), a Brazilian movement that emerged in the 1980s to demand a popular energy project.Embroidering Our Rights gathers 47 arpilleras created between 2013 and 2024 by women in workshops organized by MAB throughout Brazil. The artists' textiles address issues of domestic violence; disconnection between land and community; water and electricity access; the impact of dams and river pollution on fishing and family livelihoods; and other human and environmental rights violations.

Art and ritual intertwine in Taniki’s cosmological visions of Yanomami spiritsBorn around 1945 in the Yanomami Indigenous Lands of the Brazilian Amazon, artist and shaman André Taniki Yanomami has illustrated both the habits and rituals of his people and his own cosmological visions through vibrant, patterned drawings.

Inspired by the theories of Murray Bookchin, Cuevas’ tongue-in-cheek, pop culture–inspired installations critique capitalism’s effect on the environmentBorn in Mexico City, Minerva Cuevas (born 1975) has developed an artistic practice that questions power dynamics between humans and nonhumans. Her conceptual works and public interventions offer a critique of neoliberalism and address debates over resource extraction, forced displacement and environmental devastation.

A long-needed appraisal of the abstractions, mail art and conceptual work of Anna Bella Geiger, one of postwar Brazil’s unsung pioneersBrazilian artist Anna Bella Geiger (born 1933) was one of the first artists to engage in abstract art in Brazil, participating in the historic exhibition of Brazilian abstract art held in Rio de Janeiro in 1953. Since the 1970s she has also worked with video, conceptual art and mail art.Native Brazil/Alien Brazil, named after her provocative political postcard series from 1976, covers the artist’s entire seven-decade career from the 1950s to the present, providing an overview of the extraordinary scope and diversity of Geiger’s work and themes, including informal abstraction, self-portraits, maps, landscapes and equations, as well as the artist’s interest in the interior of the human body, and her critiques of art systems and analyses of political and historical issues of Brazil.

Images of dance in art, from Hieronymus Bosch to Keith HaringThis volume gathers 250 works of art that depict dancing and its attendant cultures. Artists include Adrian Piper, Alexander Calder, Ana Mendieta, Edgar Degas, Faith Ringgold, Hélio Oiticica, Toulouse-Lautrec, Hieronymus Bosch, Keith Haring, Leonardo da Vinci, Luchita Hurtado, Lygia Pape, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Poussin, Kandinsky and more.

Bugres' career proposes a more plural history of Brazilian sculptureThis is the first monograph on the Brazilian sculptor Conceição dos Bugres (1914–84)—best known for her “bugres,” wood sculptures covered in wax and paint resembling minimalist human forms, which she produced prolifically for three decades.

Sensuous biomorphic forms steeped in Brazilian history and culture Using materials such as bronze, concrete, stone and papier-mâché, Brazilian artist Erika Verzutti (born 1971) creates works that evoke animals and plants, landscapes and minerals, everyday items and objects from art history. This monograph spans her entire career since 2003.

Eroticism and Amazonian mythologies in the sculpture of an overlooked Brazilian SurrealistA leading figure in New York’s Surrealist circles and in Latin American modernism, the Brazilian artist Maria Martins (1894–1973) was known for her bronze sculptures of hybrid and mythological figures. Through her marriage to a Brazilian diplomat, Martins built a large part of her career outside Brazil, having lived in New York in the 1940s, when she was part of the city’s expat Surrealist community. This survey examines Martins’ central and active role in Surrealism (in a counterpart to the narratives about her romantic involvement with Duchamp), her interpretation of Amazonian mythologies and iconography from the outset of her career, and her female perspective on themes of desire and eroticism.

A fresh view of the acclaimed Brazilian modernist painter through the lens of arte popularItalian-Brazilian artist Alfredo Volpi (1896–1988) was a central figure of Brazilian art in the 20th century. His painting is influenced by both modern and customary traditions, including handcraft, popular parties, religious themes and the facades of Brazilian colonial and vernacular architecture.

Colorful depictions of daily life in Brazil's Indigenous Yanomami cultureJoseca Yanomami (born 1971) is a member of the Indigenous Yanomami people in the Brazilian Amazon. His drawings depict Yanomami culture and history and address the conflict between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. This book reproduces 93 drawings held by MASP, the most substantial existing collection of his work.

Performative interventions in everyday lifeThis is the first major monograph for Brazilian conceptual artist Cinthia Marcelle (born 1974), accompanying her solo show at MASP. Through photographs, videos, installations and interventions that make use of everyday elements, Marcelle performs displacements and operations that momentarily destabilize the order of things.