ArPa 2024 – Maria Polo: Arena Pacaembu - São Paulo

Pinakotheke is thrilled to present at the ArPa fair a solo show dedicated to the work of Maria Polo (1937-1983). The selection is part of a gallery's effort to showcase significant works from the 1960s and 1970s. Maria Polo - Active in the 196s, born in Italy and a resident in Brazil since 1959, came at the invitation of Pietro Maria Bardi. She held her first solo exhibition at MASP - Museu de Arte de São Paulo.
One of the most prominent names in informal abstraction in Brazil in the 1960s, with her own aesthetic, Maria Polo passed away prematurely at the height of her career. "To speak about Maria Polo's painting," said Vera Pacheco Jordão in O Globo in 1964, "let yourself be captivated by those paintings painted in bursts, with a spatula, in the manner of Soulages, but in an entirely different style.
If you already knew the artist's work, you see how this descendant and perhaps relative of Marco Polo, even before turning thirty, suddenly revealed herself as an adult. Or rather, mature in the realization of her work along the path that has been hers from the beginning, but now opening into a luminous clearing. What was primitive force is now lucid assertion. Details of sensitivity emerge, more moving because they are unheard of, creating a lyrical atmosphere that envelops Maria Polo's vigorous statement in a poetic aura."