Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present Temporal Maps of a Non-Sedimented Land, a solo exhibition of work by Thiago Rocha Pitta. This is Rocha Pitta’s first show at the gallery, organized in collaboration with curator Simon Watson. The exhibition will run from February 22 – March 22, 2015, at 20 Clinton Street, New York.
Thiago Rocha Pitta’s temporal and sensitive art often depicts environments from his native Brazil. Through watercolor, photography, sculpture, and video, Rocha Pitta focuses on small, yet emotive elements of the natural world, whether ocean tide, rainclouds, or trails of sap. His work manages to decelerate the passage of time within a single frame or subject, requiring the viewer’s close attention and quiet introspection.
In this exhibition, Rocha Pitta develops his study of nature through an installation of five videos, each depicting a different desert terrain in Argentina. Referred to as “maps,” these videos capture a deceptively small physical alteration in the land that causes it to either fall, collapse, or become wet or dry. Although an organic process is not at play here (the alterations are the artist’s experiments), the videos still surge with activity and transformation which allude to universal forces like entropy and death. Enacting a cascade of sand like an hourglass, or a desiccation of a small stream of water, Rocha Pitta suggests that physical dynamism is not only the prerogative of living beings, and further, that maps cannot adequately represent the ongoing effects of time. Viewed together, Rocha Pitta’s videos are a meditation on the formation and deformation of geological processes. Individually, they act like monochrome digital frescoes, amplifying the sometimes small, but nonetheless destructive forces that act incrementally together on the bedrock of our planet.
Thiago Rocha Pitta (born 1980 in Tiradentes, Minas Gerais, Brazil) is widely recognized as one of Brazil’s leading contemporary artists. He has held solo exhibitions internationally at Galeria Millan, Sao Paolo (2014); Gluck50 Gallery, Milan (2013); Andersen Contemporary, Copenhagen (2012); Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro (2010); and Meyer Riegger Galerie, Karlsruhe (2009), among others. In 2012, Rocha Pitta was selected to participate in the 30th Bienal de Sao Paolo with his installation A iminencia das poeticas. His work has been incorporated into public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; Hara Museum, Tokyo; the ThyssenKrupp, Vienna; and the Museu de Arte Moderna de Sao Paolo, Sao Paolo.
