Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand/KM – serie

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.

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.

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.

A chromatic celebration of LGBTQIA+ artists, queer and trans activisms and the "queering" of history, with works by Andrea Geyer, Claude Cahun, Félix González-Torres, Martin Wong, Peter Hujar, Roberto Burle Marx and many moreSince 2016, the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) has centered its exhibition program on exploring different histories, with each year featuring a large-scale, international and transhistorical group exhibition, paired with an exquisitely produced catalog. Following the bestselling titles Afro-Atlantic Histories and Indigenous Histories, Queer Histories is the next chapter in this cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary survey series exploring underrepresented or marginalized narratives.Gathering more than 200 artworks from public and private collections in Brazil and abroad, Queer Histories is organized into seven sections: "Love, family and communities," "The sacred and the profane," "Signs and spaces," "Activism and archives," "Survival," "Queer Abstraction" and "Visibility." While many of the artists featured in Queer Histories are working in the wake of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and its profound impact on queer and trans communities, the exhibition goes beyond artists who identify as LGBTQIA+, approaching queerness as a lens through which to reinterpret the world, to queer history and to reclaim erased narratives. This compendium is a critical resource for understanding how art and history continue to function as sites of resistance and transformation in LGBTQIA+ lives.Artists include: Andrea Geyer, Andy Warhol, Beverly Buchanan, Catherine Opie, Claude Cahun, David Wojnarowicz, Etel Adnan, Félix González-Torres, Glenn Ligon, Kia LaBeija, Leonilson, Martin Wong, Miguel Ángel Rojas, Peter Hujar, Roberto Burle Marx, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Salman Toor, Tseng Kwong Chi, Tuesday Smillie, Yuki Kihara, Zanele Muholi.

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.

In contrast to empirical Western botanical illustration, Rodríguez’s drawings show the interaction between species and the cycles of the Amazon forestsAbel Rodríguez (1941–2025), a member of the Nonuya and Muinane communities, was born in the Colombian Amazon. Entrusted as a sabedor, a keeper of botanical knowledge, Rodríguez maintained a drawing practice around native plants beginning in the 1990s.

Building objects with discarded items, plant parts and even her own body, Tossin’s mixed-media works make the disasters of climate change a realityInstead of portraying environmental catastrophe, Brazilian artist Clarissa Tossin (born 1973) seeks to incorporate its materiality, making artistic production from the residues of a collapsed world. The titular expression in this case refers to the moment in history when the effects of climate change will no longer be reversible.

Over 200 works across painting, sculpture, weaving, maps and video attest to ecological harm and suggest reparative, non-anthropocentric modes of global cohabitationThis book brings together more than 200 works by artists, activists and social movements that examine, from different perspectives, the concept of “ecology” as a system of interrelationships among human and more-than-human beings—including animals, plants, rivers, forests, mountains, fungi and minerals.Lushly illustrated, this catalog includes reproductions of works and curatorial essays divided into thematic sections—“Web of Life,” “Geographies of Time,” “On Becoming,” “Territories, Migrations, and Borders” and “Inhabiting the Climate.” The paintings, sculptures, weavings, maps and videos of the 117 artists presented, nearly all of whom come from the so-called Global South, not only shed light on the effects of colonialism, environmental racism and global capitalism on bodies, territories and ecosystems, but also the historical and structural roots of this mode of living, as well as different ways of seeing, inhabiting and transforming the planet.

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.

“Wool pictures” from a Brazilian folk artist known for her intricate and figurative tapestriesBrazilian artist Madalena Santos Reinbolt (1919–77) was known for her “wool pictures,” intricately embroidered tapestries evoking scenes and characters from her agropastoral past in the countryside of Bahia. This volume accompanies her posthumous solo show at MASP.