Sexuality and erotism are central themes in the work of Tunga (Palmares, Pernambuco1952–Rio de Janeiro, 2016) since his first solo exhibition, titled Museum of Infantile Masturbation, carried out in1974 at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro.

This 1974 exhibition included abstract drawings which would subsequently guide the thought-process surrounding these themes in the artist’s work. They were works whose forms evoked erotic images as well as processes of sexual pleasure, elements which reappear here exhibited in drawings from the same year.

Trained as an architect, Tunga’s work is expressed in different mediums, from visual art to literature, including sculpture, installation, drawing, watercolor, printmaking, video, text, and instauration. His works often draw from a repertoire tied to different fields of knowledge, such as psychoanalysis, philosophy, chemistry, alchemy, as well as memory and fiction.

In this exhibition, sexuality not only constitutes a theme found in the artist’s work, but also a means of understanding relations, connections, transformations, and creations among bodies, materials, and languages. The selection of works and their arrangement in the space seek to draw out these relations and, in lieu of a chronological arrangement, promote dialogues between works of different periods and techniques.

The title of the exhibition Tunga: The Body in Works carries a double meaning: it simultaneously alludes to the body as a concern in the artist’s works and proposes a reflection on his oeuvre as a body continually in works, that is, in constant transformation. This interpretation emerges from the expansive and circular nature of Tunga’s oeuvre, the works of which cannot be boxed into rigid categories. Visible across all the exhibited works are references to the body, sexuality, and erotism: the nude (Venus/See Nudes and Exogenous Axis), skin and make-up (in drawings and on the sculptures in the series Lips), hair (Braids and Scalps), fingers, vulvas and phalluses (Morphological and Every Twelve Days and a Letter), the masculine and the feminine (Bludgeons and Braids), and the magnetism of desire (through the magnets found in Bludgeons, Lezart, and Palindrome Incest).

The exhibition Tunga: The Body in Works closes MASP’s 2017 annual program on histories of sexuality, which included solo exhibitions of the artists Teresinha Soares, Wanda Pimentel, Miguel Rio Branco, Toulouse-Lautrec, Tracey Moffatt, Guerrilla Girls, Pedro Correia de Araújo and the group exhibition Histories of sexuality. On this occasion, MASP gives special thanks to Acervo Tunga for the donation of a sculpture from the Morphological series shown in this exhibition.

CURATED BY Tomás Toledo, Curator, MASP; Isabella Rjeille, Curatorial Assistant, MASP.