Iole de Freitas

Bio

Iole de Freitas studied at the School of Industrial Design in Rio de Janeiro (1964 – 1965). From 1970 to 1978 she lived in Milan, Italy, where she worked as a designer at Olivetti’s Corporate Image Studio. From 1973 on she produces and exhibits her artistic work. The first works by Iole de Freitas were the photographic sequences and experimental
films that she produced during her stay in Italy, in which the body was already established as a structuring element of the work. When she began to experiment with sculptural language, the presence of the body as an image gave way to the signs of its gestures, transferring its tensions and powers to the body of the sculpture. In the monumental sculptures developed from the 1990s onwards, space is sewn into broad gestures, like a body that dances on an architectural scale and establishes unforeseen continuities between inside and outside, testing the limits between monumentality and lightness. In her most recent production, the artist focus on the internal issues of each sculpture, now on a
smaller scale, such as the concave and convex, the texture, and the relationships between the parts.
Iole de Freitas began her training in contemporary dance in Rio de Janeiro, where she moved at the age of six. She studied in the Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro and, in 1970, she moved to Milan (Italy), where she started her artistic production and her participation in exhibitions, besides working as a designer for Olivetti’s Corporate Image Studio, under the guidance of the architect Hans von Klier.

Among the shows, the following stand out: 9th Paris Biennial (1975); 15th São Paulo International Biennial (1981); itinerant exhibition “Cartographies” (1993), Bronx Museum (New York), National Gallery (Ottawa, Canada) and also in Winnepeg (Canada); Bogota; Caracas and Madrid; Bienal Brasil 20th Century (São Paulo, 1994);  “The body of sculpture: the work of Iole de Freitas”, at the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo and at the Paço Imperial in Rio de Janeiro (1997); Project for permanent installations of the Museu do Açude, in Rio de Janeiro (1999); solo show at Hélio Oiticica Art Center (Rio de Janeiro, 2000), “Iole de Freitas”, at Vale Museum (Vila Velha, 2004), and “Iole de Freitas”, at Banco do Brasil Cultural Center (Rio de Janeiro, 2005 ); 5th Mercosul Biennial (Porto Alegre, 2005). In 2007 Iole was invited to make a site-specific at Documenta 12, 2007, Kassel, Germany.
In 2008 she presented her work at the Iberê Camargo Foundation, in Porto Alegre. In 2009 she exhibited at Casa França-Brasil (Rio de Janeiro) and at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, and participated in the “O Desejo da Forma” exhibition at Akademie der Kunst, in Berlin. In 2015 Iole occupied the Monumental Space of MAM Rio de Janeiro with the exhibition “The weight of each one”. In 2016, she participated in the exhibition “Os Outros e o UM: Arte Contemporânea Brasileira, at Instituto Tomie Ohtake. In 2017 she participates in the exhibition “Ways to see Brazil: Itaú Cultural 30 anos”, Oca, Ibirapuera Park (São Paulo) and in 2018 in the exhibition “BRAZIL. Knife in the Flesh” at PAC – Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea (Milan). In the same year she participated in the exhibition “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985” at the Hammer Museum and in 2019 at the Brooklyn Museum and at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo.

© Galeria Raquel Arnaud

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