• Antonio Obá | Inside the Studio
  • “The anchoring point [of my work] revolves around the statement of the presence of the body.” – Antonio Obá
    “The anchoring point [of my work] revolves around the statement
    of the presence of the body.”
    –  Antonio Obá
  • Antonio Obá develops his body of work through a road linking colonial Brazil and contemporary Brazil. Also, he walks on this road from the moment he begins to understand the black body and the black individual in the construction of history. This understanding came at the beginning of his relationship with painting, in a way that Brazilian Baroque reveals itself, and thus opens up an infinity of relationships in the artist's work, which demands a look at the past.

    Obá explores the implications of the Catholic black body and from this begins to move towards a study of objects and monotypes, which in their allegorical character, propose figures of bodies that are buried. This way is indicating their primitive forms: the fossil of man. The exploitation of erased memory takes place as a kind of excavation, soon the artist moves away from the painting and begins to look for the origin of the black man away from the Catholic faith and all its aesthetic implications.
  • Antonio Obá working during the quarantine in his studio in Brasília, 2020 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Obá's studio in Brasília, 2020 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Details of Obá's studio in Brasília, 2020 (View more details about this item in a popup).
    Obá's studio in Brasília, 2020 (View more details about this item in a popup).

    Antonio Obá working during the quarantine in his studio in Brasília, 2020

  • Obá’s paintings utilize tones of faded yellow, pink, blue, and green taken from the facades of rural homes. These homes...
    Obá’s paintings utilize tones of faded yellow, pink, blue, and green taken from the facades of rural homes. These homes are lined with a mixture of water, lime and chalk powder, a type of popular dye. Discolored over time, the homes become less uniform in color which attaches them to a historical linearity, to color collectivities and individualities with various tones of being.
  • The artist's search for the identity of his own body led him to the body image's cardinality in his work. Obá's paintings unite family photographs and historical and mythological events, presenting religiosity as the guiding thread of the various cultural layers in Brazil, but also personal layers of the artist's own identity. His work invite us into the artist's intimacy, in a resumption of a feeling, almost instinct, but denser than rationality that allows us to comprehend, which is not exactly about ‘understanding.’ Obá crossed the superficialities of references and gave the soul of an artist who now knows about his body and understands it as a geographical, political and human space, beyond body, memory, and history, which once triggered cannot be erased again. 

     

     

  • Most importantly, Obá’s production put forward the notion of self-ethnography as an epistemological strategy in the contemporary art world of... Most importantly, Obá’s production put forward the notion of self-ethnography as an epistemological strategy in the contemporary art world of...
    Most importantly, Obá’s production put forward the notion of self-ethnography as an epistemological strategy in the contemporary art world of non-hegemonic creations, by reflecting on the crisis of the metanarratives adopted by different scholars in the second half of the 20th century. Methodologically, this refers to the strategy of poetically unveiling different subjectivities in which the interpretation of the scene revisits the past by launching to the present a dialogical, polyphonic and communitarian production that weaves and inscribes Obá’s writing in the here and now: What is a Black body? What is a mixed-raced body?
     
    – Exerpt of the unpublished text by by Janaina Barros, "Fecha-Corpo/Close-Body: Memory Transmutation and Sacred Performativity in Antonio Obá", 2019  
    • Antonio Obá, Sem título, 2014
      Antonio Obá, Sem título, 2014
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    • Antonio Obá, Sem título, 2014
      Antonio Obá, Sem título, 2014
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    • Antonio Obá, Sem título, 2018
      Antonio Obá, Sem título, 2018
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    • Antonio Obá, Sem título, 2018
      Antonio Obá, Sem título, 2018
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  • Antônio Obá (Ceilândia, 1983) lives and works in Brasília.

    His works has been included in exhibitions such as 36º Panorama da Arte Brasileira, MAM-SP, São Paulo (2019); Sentinela, Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo (2019); Pele de Dentro, Mendes Wood DM, New York (2018); Histórias Afro-Atlânticas, MASP / Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo (2018); Arte Democracia Utopia - quem não luta tá morto, MAR, Rio de Janeiro (2018); Pipa Prize 2017, MAM-Rio, Rio de Janeiro (2017); entre, Casa da América Latina, Brasília (2016); My body is a cage, Galeria Luciana Caravello, Rio de Janeiro (2016); ONDEANDAAONDA, Museu Nacional da República, Brasília (2015); OCUPAÇÃO, Elefante Centro Cultural, Brasília (2014); Impermanências, Galeria de Arte Dulcina de Moraes, Brasília (2008); Sob o signo de um novo olhar, Centro cultural do SESI, Brasília (2003).