Announcing representation of Tunga

4 September 2024

Lisson Gallery presents their first exhibition of the work of Tunga (1952-2016), following the announcement of representation in September 2024. In collaboration with the Instituto Tunga, Rio de Janeiro, the exhibition will feature a selection of work by the internationally-renowned Brazilian artist, whose multi-faceted practice encompassed sculpture, installation, film, performance, drawing and poetry, creating a unique vision inspired by psychoanalysis, philosophy and alchemy. This follows Château La Coste's presentation of Tunga's work in Autumn 2024 which served as the first institutional show of Tunga’s work in Europe since his major 2005 installation at the Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Born in Palmares, Pernambuco, Antônio José de Barros Carvalho e Mello Mourão (known mononymously as Tunga) was born into a family of writers, artists and social activists. As a creative, intellectual group, Tunga’s family were forced into exile in Chile by the Brazilian military dictatorship in the 1960s. Tunga later moved to Rio de Janeiro where he pursued a degree in architecture while he developed his artistic practice, creating drawings and small-scale sculptures while editing magazines and contemporary poetry publications with fellow Rio-based artists. Driven by research across many fields, including literature, philosophy, theatre, archaeology, mathematics and science, his early works were marked by a deep interest in the symbolic and the mythological. Tunga first exhibited his three-dimensional objects in 1975 in a landmark solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, titled ‘Tunga - Ar do Corpo’. His practice evolved into complex installation-making in the 1980s with the incorporation of a wide range of materials including magnets, lightbulbs, electrical wires, copper, felt and rubber, exploring ideas of conjunction, magnetism, transmission, and the isolation of energy and invisible forces. This period also saw the emergence of the shapes and signs that would become iconic throughout his career, such as clubs, scalps, combs, bells, cauldrons, funnels and braids, as in the works: Braid (1983), Capillary Xiphopagus Among Us (1984), The Viperine Avant-Garde (1985), Exogenous Axes (1986-2000), and Seeding Mermaids (1987-1998).

Tunga’s sculptural investigations into the energetic relationships between materials intensified in the 1990s, marked by the introduction of magnets into his works, and the integration of elements of his installations with instaurations – a word he coined to describe his works activated by performance. These activations utilised materials such as clay and make-up, alluding to the primitive origins of human beings and their relationship to the earth, and to notions of reincarnation, instilling a corporeality into his objects.

Further fusing diverse elements in order to imbue them with new values, Tunga continued to explore new materials until his passing in 2016: between 2000 and 2016, his work was characterised by the emergence of bells, bottles, chalices, jewellery, teeth, wings, portals, lights, tripods and thimbles, as seen in his major exhibition at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brazil, São Paulo in 2001. In 2005, Tunga made history as the first contemporary artist to hold a solo exhibition at the Musée du Louvre in Paris with ‘A la Lumiere des Deux Mondes’, translating to ‘At the Light of Both Worlds’ (2005). In this provocative work, Tunga composed various symbolically charged objects within the glass pyramid, including a giant walking stick intertwined with braided hair and a dark net full of skulls falling towards a floor scattered with black and gold reproductions of heads from the Louvre’s classical sculpture collection. Tunga was also the first artist commissioned to create a permanent installation at the Inhotim Institute in Brumadinhos, Brazil in 2004; the True Rouge pavilion developed out of a series of performances of the same name, inspired by the algebraic poetry of British writer Simon Lane.

Since 2016, the Instituto Tunga – founded and directed by the artist’s son, Antônio Mourão – has worked to preserve, conserve, catalogue and disseminate his extensive work and memory. His work has been presented in major exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, and Tate Modern, London, as well as the acquiring of Tunga’s work by institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

On the announcement of Lisson’s representation of Tunga, Mourão says:
This is a very special moment for Tunga’s legacy. The Tunga Institute will hold exhibitions at Château La Coste (France) in September, at Malba (Argentina) in October and at the Ling Institute (Brazil) in November, highlighting the geographic and cultural breadth of Tunga’s influence, and its contemporary relevance. In December, we will present the Catalogue Raisonné of the artist's two- dimensional works, edited and published by Cahiers d'Art Institute - a milestone that will portray the consistent research around his practice. The representation of the estate by Lisson is a source of pride and brings the certainty that, together, the Gallery and the Institute will preserve and disseminate Tunga’s memory and work, reaching new audiences worldwide.

Alex Logsdail, CEO of Lisson Gallery, says:
I first started traveling to Brazil about 15 years ago and experiencing Brazilian Modernist art and architecture, which developed in parallel with the west and was extraordinary to explore what I had only seen in books. One artist really stood out as especially unique, which was Tunga. His ability to blend the political and surreal with visceral material and highly inventive sculptural modes makes him a distinctive figure in Brazil and globally. I had the great pleasure of meeting Tunga a year or so before he died and it was an extraordinary experience that I will never forget. We couldn't be happier to be representing the estate and working with Tunga's son, Antônio, to further the legacy of this singular and extraordinary artist outside of Brazil.