Past exhibitions

8 – 25 October 2008

Memória Roubada
(Stolen Memories)

Memória Roubada

Ana Maria Pacheco, previously Associate Artist at the National Gallery, shows this dramatic 2-piece work for the first time at Wallspace this autumn, including new work made especially for the space.

Her powerful and disturbing painted wooden sculptures Memória Roubada I and II confront ideas of displaced people and severed cultures - results of the colonisation of Brazil.


John The Baptist

Born in Goiânia in the State of Goiás, Brazil in 1943, Pacheco was studying at University when a military junta had taken over the country and was using death squads to enforce its rule. The pieces here express the obliteration of shared memory, the rape of cultural tradition and the idea of castration of the senses in the domination of a culture in the pursuit of money; the search for gold and more recently, oil.

These pieces are inspired by 'oratories' originating in Portugal and Spain - as domestic locations for private prayer. They also draw on European and Brazilian folklore and elements of West African iconography. This multiplicity of reference is woven of threads ever present in Brazil's multi-ethnic history.

Now based in London, Ana Maria Pacheco is known for her larger than life-sized carved and painted wooden sculptures that seem to have broken free from their specific past, to form dramatic and unsettling contemporary tableaux. In 1996 she was invited to become the fourth Associate Artist at the National Gallery, London; she was both the first non-European and the first sculptor to take up this appointment. Pacheco sculpted Dark Night of The Soul, with its reference to St Sebastian, during this time.

Pacheco was featured artist in Melvyn Bragg's Faith in The Frame ITV 1 series broadcast on 2 November 2008.

Photos: © Pratt Contemporarty Art