Fusões
In 2013, the Jewish Cultural Center in São Paulo, Brazil, opened the exhibition Fusões (Fusions) by Gregório Gruber and Debora Muszkat. The artists worked together for over a year portraying personalities and emblematic figures from history with an important common trait. During the process, ideas and materials mixed and transformed, resulting in a series of works with characteristics distinct from the individual styles of each artist.
Legacy and personas in transformation
What is it to be Brazilian? What is it to be Italian, Argentinian, Polish? What is it to be a woman?
The theme of “identities” appears frequently in contemporary art productions, and perhaps there will never be a definitive answer to this type of question. Each work of art, each event, each book, each concrete person is in fact redefining the terms of this identity – and constructing their own, individual, unmistakable one.
What is it to be Jewish? The question is perhaps even more complicated than the others, and more important than others of the same type. Having, for centuries, been in contact with various other countries and cultures, the Jew had at the same time to remain faithful to a series of religious, linguistic, and cultural traditions that preserved them from simply disappearing.
The threat of disappearance – not only cultural, but also physical – became, however, a particularly dramatic part of their own cultural history, their own tradition, after the Shoah.
Gregório Gruber and Debora Muszkat, as Brazilians, from São Paulo, and artists, lived their identities – and many others – in unique ways. As artists, neither of them followed the dictates of the most fashionable trends in contemporary art, creating individual, avant-garde forms of expression.
Text by Marcelo Coelho
