02 July - 14 August 2022
Opening 1 July 2022, 7 p.m.
With the Mannheim Art Prize of the Heinrich Vetter Foundation, the City of Mannheim and the Heinrich Vetter Foundation promote professional artists who live and work in the metropolitan region. 2022 marks the ninth occasion on which the Prize, handed out this year for sculptural works and installation, has been awarded.
Francisco Klinger Carvalho works multi-medially and pursues a highly distinct formal language and imagery, in which he makes reference to matters of interaction and delimitation in the cohabitation of societies and likewise to the relationship between humans and nature. One recurring motif is the loss of culture and identity, of nature and homeland. At the same time, Francisco Klinger Carvalho's works appear poetic and, now and then, surreal. His art is deeply rooted in Brazilian culture, particularly that of the Amazon. It takes its nourishment from the latter, and the motifs and memories of this traditional, fragile culture and nature leave a stamp on Francisco Klinger Carvalho’s works. Simultaneously, the works reveal the external view of Brazil’s culture. As he himself is a wanderer between worlds, these worlds are mutually reflected and combined in his artistic oeuvre.
He acts politically without turning his art into politics. His art is political without depicting. One prominent work in the exhibition is the sound installation “AMAZONIA: Symphonie einer Erinnerung”, which Francisco Klinger Carvalho has already exhibited in a different arrangement and in various contexts multiple times. It harks back to his experiences as a young activist in Brazil in the 1980s. Back then, he began recording human voices and birdsong in Amazonia, for he feared that these would be lost at some point. That this “at some point” has already commenced is implied not only by the title, “AMAZONIA: Symphony of a Memory”: charcoal-black tree trunks and branches
and likewise carbonised furnishings are assembled into a graphic-looking room-installation. The near-vanished sound of Amazonia resonates from loudspeakers: it is a picture of ephemerality, of man-made destruction, full of mourning and simultaneously of well-nigh abstract beauty. A metal grid cage surrounds the installation and delimits it. What is enclosed by the cage is protected and abstracted to equal degrees.
This work exemplarily demonstrates the characteristic working methods and motifs of Francisco Klinger Carvalho. For instance, the substantially and formally ambiguous grid structure appears repeatedly. His materials of choice – wood, bricks, metal, furniture items and other everyday objects – are found or sourced on site: they are simple materials, often used things.
Francisco Klinger Carvalho’s installations arise one out of the other, in variations. Each time they are exhibited, they take on a different shape, some of them then consisting of a different material, and adapt to the space or location. Elements that appear in one work can become catalysts of a new direction in the oeuvre.
Francisco Klinger Carvalho (*1966 in Óbidos / Brazil) studied at the Universidade Federal do Estado do Pará, Belém and at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He has been the recipient of numerous distinctions and fellowships and he exhibits internationally.
to the website of Heinrich Vetter Foundation
Guided tours
Sunday, 10 July 2022, 3 p.m. with Konstantin Weber
Thursday, 28 July2022, 6 p.m. with Kim Behm
Thursday, 04 August 2022, 6 p.m. with Melek Kilic in Turkish language
Catalog presentation
Saturday, 13 August 2022, 6 p.m.
360° tour of the exhibition
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