ABOUT RENATA

Bio

Renata Meirelles, a visual artist graduated at the Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado [FAAP], performs research and experimentation in textiles overlap between art, design and jewellery. With an original language, she has developed a constructive system that combines industrial and artisanal techniques, using laser cutting and new technologies while bringing back manual techniques. The artist develops collections made up of wearable pieces as well as textile objects and panels that reveal her work on another scale. She creates constructive systems that unfold into the works that are part of each collection. Cutouts and wefts the artist calls “needleless lace” and “wearable sculptures.” Her textile objects explore transparencies and overlaps that can be worn in different ways, a constant characteristic of her work. Her poetic features a fine line between precision and delicacy.

The artist has received awards, among which from the Museu da Casa Brasileira [Brazilian House Museum] and A CASA Museu do Objeto Brasileiro [A CASA Brazilian Object Museum]. She has taken part in Biennials and her works have been displayed in jewellery and textile art exhibitions both in Brazil and abroad.

Renata is a member of Grupo Broca, which carries out research in contemporary jewellery. She was recently a member of the jury at the Prêmio Design Museu da Casa Brasileira [MCB] in the Textiles category and has given lectures and done curatorship work.

CV

Renata Meirelles was born in 1964 in São Paulo, Brazil. In 1982, she graduated in Visual Arts at the Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado [FAAP]. She currently lives in São Paulo.

Exhibitions

2019

• TraMares, Um Recorte do Têxtil Brasileiro, within the VIII Bienal Internacional de Arte Textil Contemporáneo WTA – Casa do Brasil – Madrid, Spain – Curatorship: Renata Meirelles, Eva Soban, and Juan Ojea.
• Collectiva Meeting, International Exhibition – Galeria Collectiva – Porto, Portugal
• Vecinos em Itinerancia – Museo Municipal de Arte Decorativo Firma y Odilo Estevez – Rosário, Argentina
• Brazil Jewelry Week – with Grupo Broca – A Casa do Parque – São Paulo, Brazil
• Aquilo que Abraça – with Grupo Broca – Galeria Virgílio – São Paulo, Brazil
• Aquilo que Abraça – with Grupo Broca – MADE – Mercado.Arte.Design – Pavilhão da Bienal – São Paulo, Brazil
• Reflexão_colares – Casa de Pedra – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – Curatorship: Miriam Mirna Korolkovas

2018

• Aquilo que Abraça: Joalheria Contemporânea Brasileira– CCBA Centro Cultural Brazil-Argentina – Buenos Aires, Argentina – Curatorship: Miriam Andraus Pappalardo and Renata Porto
• BID_18, Bienal Iberoamericana de Diseño – Central de Diseño de Matadero Madrid – Madrid, Spain
• II Bienal Latinoamericana de Joyería Contemporánea – Theme “Vecinos” – Museo de Arte Popular José Hernández – Buenos Aires, Argentina
• Brazil S/A OFF – Bianca Maria Palace Hotel – Milan, Italy
• EnTransito – with Grupo Broca – Museo Juan del Corral – Santa Fe de Antioquia, Colombia – Curatorship: Francisca Kweitel
• Concurso Internacional de Diseño de Joyería Contemporánea en Madera – 8^th Feria Internacional del Mueble y la Madera, FEDEMA 2018 – Formosa, Argentina
• 6^th Prêmio Objeto Brasileiro – A CASA Museu do Objeto Brasileiro – São Paulo, Brazil
• Joia Contemporânea Brasileira – Reflexão_colares – KORU6 Triennial in Helsinki, Finland; Brazilian Embassy in Stockholm, Sweden; ARgenTUM Gallery in Vilnius, Lithuania – Curatorship: Miriam Mirna Korolkovas
• Tanto Mar: Fluxos Transatlânticos do Design – Held by the Museu de Design e Moda [MUDE] – Palácio dos Condes da Calheta Jardim – Lisbon, Portugal – Curatorship: Bárbara Coutinho and Adélia Borges
• RE_TRATO 3X4 – with Grupo Broca – Alice Floriano Gallery – Porto Alegre, Brazil
• Itinerância BID_16 – Latin America

MORE

Por outros

Adélia Borges

Renata Meirelles is a creative mill! We frequently meet. We live in the same neighborhood in São Paulo and share many friends. In each meeting, she always has something new to show on the screen of her phone. Sometimes it’s an idea in gestation; other times, entire collections already thought out in its multiple unfoldings. Likely as a heritage of the time when she was a producer and had to make things happen, the time between ideation and concretization is usually very short.

I’m charmed by the way she fully uses the materials. There is no leftover; everything is supplies. From an apparent limitation – the shreds resulting from cutting fabric, for example –, Renata makes the starting point for a creation. I’m also charmed by her free roaming among techniques, particularly by bringing together low and high tech; from manual to digital procedures, from laser cutting to 3D printing. And her free transit over different scales, from wearable objects for the body to those that invade spaces.

A good example of such expanded scale took place at the Bienal Brasileira de Design [Brazilian Design Biennial] held in 2010 in Curitiba, of which I was the general curator. I instigated her to create a piece especially for the exhibition, taking advantage of the high ceiling available. The piece, around 8 meters [26 ft] tall, was the leading attraction in the space, all while maintaining the delicacy and fluidity that characterize her work.

Of the small serial pieces, I really like the fact they’re reasonably affordable. I made a point of including them in the portfolio of the shop at the São Paulo Museum of Art [Masp] since 2016, when I became a curatorship consultant there.

If the only thing certain in life is eternal change, Renata Meirelles asserts that adage in her work, itself in continuous transformation without ever losing the unicity of its main thread.

Adélia Borges is a design curator, journalist and historian. Former director of the Museu da Casa Brasileira [Brazilian House Museum], in São Paulo, she has taken part in exhibitions in eight countries and is the author of 12 books. Adélia graduated in 1973 at the Escola de Comunicação e Artes [School of Communication and Arts] of the Universidade de São Paulo [ECA-USP]. Text written in 2019.

Clarissa Schneider

In Brazil, the interest in textile art and its expression elicits artists as Renata Meirelles, who produces a collection of sculptural pieces that seem to sprout from the earth, playing with elements, cutouts, and conjugations, in a paradox of technological entanglements – when she uses laser cutting –, or vernacular typologies – in the shape of weft ties.

Renata makes art with design and teases the eye, stirs curiosity, speaks without saying. And she makes wearable art.

Graceful and enigmatic shapes make the objects as desirable as a collector’s item and reflect a present-day challenge, which is to make something whose purpose is to give pleasure through what is beautiful and meaningful.

Architecture and design curator. Text written in 2018.

Luján Cambariere

Negative and positive. Background and subject. Container and content. The work of São Paulo-native Renata Meirelles roams between those opposites in an absolutely subtle, ethereal and exquisite game.
A visual artist by trade [graduated at FAAP], it was her husband in the industry who put her in contact with the possibilities of machinery that, albeit conceived for other purposes, was employed by her in the project of several of her works.
In the beginning, large works for companies and architecture studios – environments, furniture and decoration –, presented through her company Performa, until, a few years ago, she started focusing, after extensive research, on the most recent phase of her work, which has earned her several awards. Renata Meirelles received a honorable mention at the Prêmio Museu da Casa Brasileira, took part in the Bienal Brasileira de Design [Brazilian Design Biennial] in Curitiba – where one of her most imposing works, a 7-meter [23 ft] installation with several overlapping fabric panels, hung at the entrance to welcome visitors – and, recently, she held an exhibition in Toronto, with her works being sold at the Textile Museum of Canada, in addition to participating in the show at New York MoMA. A bet where she combines her more artistic and artisanal side with the industrial facet of her work. And she crosses borders of all types as her textiles not only dress the house, but also tattoo the body.

Journalist specialized in design and handicraft. Director of Àtico Diseño. Author of the books “El alma de los objetos” and “Master Craft.” Text written in 2011.

Miriam Mirna Korolkovas

Renata Meirelles, an artist who produces works that multiply at the same pace with which she talks, with which she moves her fingers when entwining the threads of a necklace…
From a piece of fabric, she weaves another; the leftovers, she turns into jewellery and into attire that dances with the body and on the body.
Her entire production is smooth as the wind and fierce as the storm.
In a pleasantly sized atelier, Renata tells her trajectory with drawings, mock-ups, experiments, readable documentation to understand the progress of her work. Each shred tells a story and keeps a secret in its color.
As a large web, her work is enclosing the world!

Miriam Mirna Korolkovas is a curator at A CASA Museu do Objeto Brasileiro [Brazilian Object Museum] and AJF Brazilian ambassador. Text written in 2018.

Mônica Moura

Renata Meirelles was born in São Paulo in 1964 and grew up playing with the elements and cycles of nature in the country towns of the state. The youngest child and only girl among two brothers, her family is of Italian and Portuguese descent. Her mother was an artist, a painter who, in 1947, took part in the 19 Pintores [19 Painters] exhibition in the state capital and influenced and encouraged her in the field of arts. Thus Renata, at seven years old, began studying painting and engraving, setting off her path in the universe of visual arts.
The involvement with arts would be consolidated with her college education in visual arts, enhanced by the experience obtained along with ateliers of different artistic expressions, particularly those related to working with paper and multiples, notably so engraving and serigraphy [silk-screening].
In trailing her artistic education, still a student, she was selected to attend a one-year preparatory course so she could work as a monitor at the 16th Bienal de São Paulo in 1981. This monitoring takes her into close contact with several artistic languages, works and experience along with major artists, especially Amélia Toledo and Regina Silveira. Such experiences were significant not only for her academic education, but also for her development as an artist and designer.
So much that the following years were marked by her participation in art exhibitions and design shows that brought together professionals in those areas. In that phase, from the exploration of paper and bookbinding, Renata Meirelles created diaries, notepads, booklets, folders. Hence, the artist kicked off her professional life marketing her creations.
The development of such practices and the commercial relationship with different companies made Renata enhance her capacity of creating original constructive systems in reduced working steps, which enabled great inventiveness and variety in product lines marked by expressiveness and originality in a constant dialogue between art and design, between creation and commercial market. In this way, she engendered a procedure whose essence was the relation between creation and production in collaborative processes as she didn’t have a factory, but worked with artisans and industries that made the components or parts of her pieces, meeting the demand of her creations, product lines or collections, usually made in large numbers. Thus, Renata learned to refer to her professional partners the jobs in which they had notable expertise. In addition, she fulfilled a requirement she imposed to herself – to maintain continuous production to those partners. That spawned her experience of seeking [and finding] diversity and alternatives for solutions in face of challenges and requests she encountered in her trajectory.
Trailing the professional path while exploring creative and constructive possibilities led her to an original language that resulted in several awards and national and international exhibitions that portray a work and road with 30 years of experience and with a unique production that wanders among art, design and contemporary jewellery.

PhD professor and researcher at Universidade Estadual Paulista [Unesp]. Text written in 2018.

Rubens Zacharias Jr.

Renata Meirelles’ work sets off from something that’s not represented. In her language, the edges, the limits, the complementary – shape/void, object/space, negative/positive – roam free. From the art of autochthonous peoples to graphical processes of design, her research starts at one point and moves towards another. Over this course, we notice in her objects something organic, a plane in expansion that goes from one field to another, breaking boundaries. In this way, her objects bring together plane and shape, expand to originate a living and organic space, a stage for sensitivities. In the several series of works, there is a thorough process that involves the transformation of an abstract weave into an organic line.
In smaller pieces, which she keeps in her atelier, the several lines that permeate her entire production are transmuting into objects with shapes that reveal the interior and exterior; they depart from the serial arrangements of previous works. The free choice of materials, actions and concepts makes her objects ever more organic, many reminding us of the body or textiles. Renata’s works can be articulated as pieces of clothing, fit the body as wearable creations, doing away with the space between observer and object. There is a tactile sense and, at the same time, shapes, lines and colors irradiate to our eyes.
Her works also comprise textures and qualities, require an observer that is present, involved with the magnetism of the surfaces; visible are the effects of several overlapping layers, the limits of appearance and similarity. The union between image and material, in all of its various aspects, is one of the key subject matters in Renata Meirelles’s work.
For most, the support of the creation can be the body, the space, nothing is discarded or neutralized, many of her works encompass face and reverse. It’s important to point out the very relation of the artist’s work with design: We see different lines that cross, touch, intermingle and are characterized as layouts in space. A reason to exemplify this organic line, based on her latest spatial works in which the relation of the movement of our bodies along with the work is activated. These installations work as spatial coordinates, belong to a line that is a bearing.
Besides this empirical baggage, her works speak of growth as that line born out of intention turns into structures. The structure plays a major role in her work, or perhaps it would be correct to say a post-structure, as the abstract [graphical] line of her pieces is organized to always migrate to heterogeneous structures, it requires the exterior where it is transfigured, acquiring materiality, uniting technology, body and space.

Researcher and visual artist. Text written in 2019.

Where to Find

Armazém do Marton
Carbono Galeria
Ciao Mao – Shopping Market Place
Debora Quer
Dpot Objeto
IT Design – Instituto Tomie Ohtake
Malba Tienda [Buenos Aires]
MAM SP – Store
MASP – Store
Obra – Ipanema
Zona D – OSESP

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I’m grateful to all people who follow my trajectory and have written about me and my work: Adélia Borges, Clarissa Schneider, Juliana Alves, Luján Cambariere, Miriam Mirna Korolkovas, Mônica Moura, and Rubens Zaccharias Jr.
To the assistants at the atelier who supports me in developing the work, following the creation and execution of pieces and of the whole process of sales, distribution, and participation in exhibitions, curatorship and lectures. A work that requires the dedication and involvement of all. Thanks to all of those who have left, but live in the memory of each piece, and to those who are today part and contributors to my growth and improvement.
To photographers Ligia Maria Eça Negreiros, for over 10 years of working partnership, Joaquim Ramalho, Gal Oppido, Eduardo Barcellos, Roberta Leme, Marie Ange Unbekandt, Camila Nicoletti, Jéssica Tanizaka, and Luciano Milano. To Joaquim Ramalho for the video and to Letícia Moura and Maria Mariutti of Conjunto 31 for the website.