Carlito Carvalhosa (born 1961, São Paulo, Brazil) lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. Carvalhosa appeared in the national art scene in the 1980s, as a member of the collective Grupo Casa 7, alongside Rodrigo Andrade, Fabio Miguez, Nuno Ramos and Paulo Monteiro, a period in which he produced large paintings with an emphasis on the pictorial gesture. For more than twenty years the artist has been using varied means and various types of objects – including lamps, fabrics, wax, wood and mirrors – to investigate the architectural space, the nature of materials in abstract forms and the reception of the spectator in contact with them. According to the Portuguese curator Marta Mestre, what interests the artist is “the relation between space and the act of building. Mobilized by the artist, construction is a process to reorder the world ahead of it, to withstand its chaos and thus to differentiate activity from nature.” Mestre also points out that the work of Carvalhosa is “permeated by the thought of sculpture as a construction, adding the gesture and removing the emptiness.” These observations are evident in his more recent works such as Soma dos Dias (A Sum of Days), a monumental site-specific installation made for the Octagon project at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (2010) and at the MoMA atrium (2011), and the installation Sala de Espera (Waiting Room) at MAC-USP (2013), in which twenty-four wooden posts were suspended in the exhibition space, in conjunction with the Niemeyer architecture.

Carvalhosa participated in the Biennial of Havana, Cuba (1986 and 2012); of the Mercosur Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil (2001 and 2009); of the 18th São Paulo Biennial, Brazil (1985). He performed the Rio action at MoMA in New York (2014) and some of his solo shows: at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil (2013); in the Containers Project, Guimarães, Portugal (2012); and at MoMA, New York, USA (2011).

His works are included in important public collections, such as: Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami, USA; FUNARTE, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Museum of Art of Pará, Belém, Brazil; Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Pinacoteca of the State of São Paulo, Brazil; Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, Brazil; Museum of Contemporary Art, University of São Paulo, Brazil; Museum of Contemporary Art of Niterói, Brazil; Museum of Modern Art of Bahia, Salvador, Brazil.

[Galeria Nara Roesler]