Paulo Nazareth

Mendes Wood DM is pleased to present Nosotros Los Otros, a solo exhibition of Brazilian artist Paulo Nazareth to inaugurate the opening of the gallery’s new exhibition space in Tribeca.

Nosotros Los Otros brings together bodies of work from 2005 to the present, including Nazareth’s durational walk performances as well as photo, film, sculpture, and work on paper. Spanning continents and media, this is the most comprehensive overview of the artist’s practice to take place in the United States.

The gallery’s new 7,000 square foot space in Tribeca features three exhibition spaces with the opportunity to mount significant exhibitions, installations, and multi-media screenings. Previously located at 60 East 66th Street, the gallery’s expansion to 47 Walker Street underlines its commitment to bringing Brazilian artists into critical dialogue and cross-pollination with an international audience, emphasizing a recontextualization of the global South.

“I first met Paulo Nazareth in 2007. I ran an artist residency in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, prior to opening the gallery in São Paulo and he was the first artist who came in residence with us. Not long after, Paulo was invited to a studio exchange with an artist residency in New York City. I asked him if I could arrange a flight or, even, a bus. He politely declined. Per a conceptual edict, he walked to New York—traversing every country in between—and arrived almost two years later. His South to North journey intended to invert the historical flow of information and impositions of power: essentially a historical narrative.

Now, 15 years later, it’s no coincidence that Paulo will be our inaugural show at 47 Walker. He is a Walker himself. His radical, non-linear walk-abouts, first South to North and then North to South again, reflect a notion of the world as an open field of possibility, one subject to re-writing and re-signifying. These are methodologies and concerns the gallery has sought to represent since its inception in 2010 and will continue to promote in our new home in Tribeca.”

—Matthew Wood, Founding Partner

Nazareth’s performance and installation-based work draws upon his Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous heritage to investigate social constructions of race and identity. Through his multi-year walk performances throughout the Americas and the African continent, Nazareth documents the nuances of border crossing and connects transnational histories through precise and simple gestures to address issues of immigration, globalization, and colonialism. Nazareth’s practice represents a slow, real-time inquiry into his own experience and that of the individuals he encounters, tracing a subtle matrix of connections that bridge not only people, but communities and shared histories. Nazareth seeks to embody the idea of the artist as a connector, a decoder, and a philosopher.

The exhibition takes as its point of departure Pe Vermei [Red Foot], an early video work shot in 2005 in his hometown near Belo Horizonte, Brazil, where the artist begins to document his practice as a walker. Nazareth’s sandaled feet gather red dirt in a poetic gesture imbued with social connotations in an economically and racially stratified Brazil.

Expanding on this theme, the series Notícias de América [News from America] follows the artist’s travels throughout Southern and Latin America and the United States between 2009 to 2011. Throughout the journey, Nazareth walks in flipflops with the single-minded goal of not washing his bare feet as they touch the earth of the Americas. His feet become a sort of impressionistic image gathered from every country he traverses, until he washes them at last in the Hudson River.

Also on view are works from Cadernos de Africa [Africa Notebooks], an ongoing journey he began in 2013 crisscrossing South America and North America and the near-entirety of the African continent. The work attempts to gather displaced and oftentimes unperceived cultural connections throughout the Black Atlantic.

Nazareth sets out from his mother’s kitchen, inspired by food and oral narratives as enduring links to his own identity and as a way to begin to sketch the indelible and lasting legacy of the African diaspora throughout the Americas.

The Red Inside is the most recent series undertaken by the artist from 2015 to 2018. The journey traces the various pathways of the Underground Railroad from the Southern United States to Canada, as well as mapping out locations significant to the Civil Rights movements and the wider history of enslavement in the Americas.

Paulo Nazareth (Born, 1977) lives and works throughout the world. Recent exhibitions include: Paulo Nazareth: Stroke, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto (forthcoming in 2022); Paulo Nazareth: Vuadora, Pivô, São Paulo (2022); Paulo Nazareth, ICA Miami, Miami (2019); Faca Cega, Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte (2018); Old Hope, Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo (2017), Genocide in Americas, Meyer Riegger, Berlin (2015), Journal, Institute for Contemporary Arts, London (2014), Premium Bananas,MASP, Museum of Art São Paulo(2013). Recent group exhibitions includeBeyond the Black Atlantic,Kunstverein Hannover, Hannover (2020);22nd Sydney Biennial, Sydney (2020);Our Selfie, MO Museum, Vilnius (2019); How to talk with birds, trees, fish, shells, snakes, bulls and lions, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin (2018); Extreme. Nomads, MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main (2018); The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp, Prospect.4 Triennial, New Orleans (2017); Field Gate, Remai Modern, Sasktoon (2017); Soft Power. Arte Brasil, Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort (2016); Much wider than a line, SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe (2016); New Shamans/Novos Xamãs: Brazilian Artists, Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2016); Indigenous Voices, Latin American Pavilion 56th Venice Biennale, Venice (2015).