Ana Maria Tavares
° 1958
Born in Belo Horizonte (BR), lives in São Paulo (BR).
The Brazilian Ana Maria Tavares draws her inspiration from the architecture around her. Not only is the modern city of São Paulo, where she lives and works, a muse, but in fact so is every architectural given she encounters there. First and foremost she strives to integrate typical Brazilian architecture in her installations. She uses materials like glass, steel, iron and mirrors to create structures that make one think of stairs, hallways, rooms and furniture. Functional objects, however, are divested of their outer skin and the artist looks for the impractical potentialities that sit captive in the thing. Tavares’s work also balances on the frontier between architecture, design and the visual arts. We wind up in a maze of architectural interventions that are exclusively intended for us, the spectator, even though the spaces at first view seem quite functional. With her work Tavares comments precisely on universal spaces like airports, bus stops, waiting rooms and highways. It doesn’t matter if they find themselves in Antwerp or São Paulo, they remain recognizable to everyone. This form of public space is also termed non-space. These non-places have great uniformity and seem interchangeable. In her work Tavares integrates the feeling of disorientation that these non-places evoke to wrong-foot the viewer.
