I ARRIVED IN SÃO PAULO the day before Trump’s tariff “Liberation Day,” which regrettably coincided with the opening of SP-Arte—the largest of Brazil’s art fairs—and the vibe was clearly off. I was last here in September 2018, just after the election of Jair Bolsonaro, the thirty-eighth president of Brazil, who rose to power by mimicking the in-your-face rhetoric and no-compromise style of our own Cheeto-in-chief. It was no surprise that throngs of protesters flooded Avenida Paulista during that visit, calling out the same injustices and in numbers that mirrored the demonstrations that took place across the United States on January 21, 2017. This visit, Bolsonaro was out, and left-leaning Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was reelected to the presidency after a twelve-year gap. The sentiment around his presidency mimicked that of Americans during the brief reign of fellow octogenarian Joe Biden, complete with now-naive-seeming complaints about inflation.
The day before the opening I headed to the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, which had opened its new wing the week before, as I was graciously offered a private tour by newly minted MASP assistant curator and frequent Artforum contributor Mateus Nunes. I have long admired the focused, revisionist, and inward-looking program here, one led by artistic director Adriano Pedrosa. Since taking over in 2014, over the course of eight Histórias—thematic group exhibitions (Histories of the Afro-Atlantic, Indigeneity, Feminism, Childhood, LGBTQIA, etc.) that each explore one contribution to Brazilian national identity—Pedrosa has transformed the museum into Latin America’s most prominent contemporary art institution. And in addition to curating the last Venice Biennale, he was simultaneously fundraising for, renovating, and planning the opening of a new building that more than doubles the exhibition space. The new building was formed out of the gut renovation of an adjacent concrete edifice. Though the building itself is quite imposing, the new galleries seem modest in ambition, with tidy, medium-scale spaces devoted to institutional history, conservation studios, an exhibition of geometric abstraction, and objects of African descent, among others.
The next day was the opening of the fair, held within the Biennial Pavilion in Ibirapuera Park. Immediately, something felt different from the last time I attended in 2018. It became clear pretty quickly what that was: The vast majority of the galleries were Brazilian. It felt like a decidedly national affair, with no Lisson, Zwirner, Marian Goodman, or White Cube booths to be found. As a result, the vast majority of the art on display was Brazilian.
In lieu of the endless offsprings of AbEx one typically sees at fairs throughout the Western world, Concretism, Neo-Concretism, and other varieties of hard-edged abstraction reigned: Sergio Camargos, Lygia Papes, Hélio Oiticicas, and Abraham Palatniks and their conceptual and formal descendants were everywhere; the kind of art that doesn’t lend itself to long didactics and educators who stand around telling you what the art “means.” Along with these were the superstars of the Brazilian art world we seldom get to see in the United States in any concentrated way: Artworks by the likes of Claudia Andujar, Antonio Dias, Wanda Pimentel, Miguel Rio Branco, Alfredo Volpi, Leda Catunda, Valeska Soares, Leonilson, and Rubens Gerchman shone. These are all household names in Brazil, but not one of those mentioned has received a major museum retrospective in the US. For Americans like myself, it was a treat to see the works of these artists, and without the presence of the usual number of international gallerists, curators, and socialites, the feeling for me was one of liberation (of a kind that had nothing to do with Trumpian economic policy): a chance to see this art on its own terms.
However, it also made me wonder about the point of this fair. Why is there this kind of isolationist art market here? What are well-heeled Paulistas here to see? Each other, no doubt, as the stalwarts of art fairs translated here: white women with expensive purses and shoes, gallery gays in Homme Plissé Issey Miyake and expressive glasses, black-clad gallerinas looking frantic. What was also different this time around was that many of the galleries hailed from outside the main loci of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, from places like Recife, Fortaleza, Salvador, and Belo Horizonte, and I speculated that this might be the source of enticement for local collectors. I didn’t feel a sense of urgency, though; there had to be another reason to mount such an endeavor.
The answer, of course, had to do with taxes and their effect on what could be sold, seen, and held in this country. Prior to the presidency of Bolsonaro and his anti-globalist trade policies (sound familiar?), art bought and sold during SP-Arte had a reprieve from the oppressively high tariffs which were levied on the importation of artworks in Brazil—a crushing 47 percent, plus taxes that could increase the amount to up to 60 percent of the value of the artwork. Previously, the fair represented a moment where foreign galleries could peddle their wares to a market that craved them. That went away during the Bolsonaro presidency, and the Lula presidency has failed to reinstate the freehold. That 47 percent tax to import was back, left in place despite Bolsonaro’s graceless exit from Brazilian politics. This year, during SP-Arte, there was a bit of a reprieve from the tariffs, 16 percent, so that was an incentive for the fair to happen—just not enough to bring back many of the galleries we associate with our borderless art market.
What do these kinds of macroeconomic policies do to a market? It kind of works exactly like it does for every other good. Buy Brazilian! Artworks made within Brazil are bought and sold domestically, or are passed down between families, and a kind of protectionism is born wherein there is a strong local market that is self-sustaining and insular, yet incredibly rich in its ability to create a tautology of Brazilian art across the decades. It means that you get a lot of Neo-Concretism, as I mentioned above. It also means that art from abroad can come visit—say, for temporary exhibitions—but can’t stay. Museum collections and private collectors are focused on Brazilian legacies—the situation is great for those peripatetic global curators who come to Brazil hunting for fresh meat—a fertile art scene laden with little curatorial treasures created by artists who seemed just outside our orbit. But all this was bad for the local educators, art students, art aficionados, or anyone without the means to travel to see art; they wouldn’t have the same long-term opportunities to benefit from our newly globalized recounting of the history of art.
After spending the day taking in the fair, I decided it was time to see how the galleries were faring. Again, Brazilian artists were the norm, with expressive, exuberant exhibitions by Gokula Stoffel at Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel and Dora Longo Bahia at Vermelho, and a tidy, elegant presentation by Marcius Galan at Luisa Strina. My last stop was at Yehudi Hollander-Pappi, a new gallery that had opened only a week before my arrival. Inside the modest space, sandwiched between the ubiquitous high-rise apartments that are the norm throughout the city, any ideas I had about Brazilian isolationism went out the window. An Adrián Villar Rojas fridge still-life sculpture greeted visitors; in the back, a small Paul Thek gem hung; while an Anne Imhof video was projected prominently above, among many other global art-world darlings whose work was assembled here. I thought, what gives? Turns out, you can bring this kind of work to Brazil if you have the cash to pay for it. In a recent interview in the Art Newspaper, the gallery principals—two of whom are former Mendes Wood DM staff, the other the well-to-do collector Monica Hollander—revealed that to defeat these crushing tariffs and support great artists, the gallery had to “burn cash.”
A few days and a short flight later I landed in Porto Alegre, to see the Fourteenth Mercosul Biennial. Organized by Denver Art Museum curator of modern and contemporary Latin American art Raphael Fonseca, this year’s Mercosul was especially significant. A year earlier, the most devastating flooding to take place in the country in almost a century swamped the state of Rio Grande do Sul, killed 117, injured thousands, and left much of the city under brown, murky water. The biennial was postponed for a year to accommodate the recovery effort. However, it would now have to respond to the collective sentiment in this city and answer the question of how an art exhibition might confront the emotional and physical trauma left behind by a climate disaster of this scale.
Initially created as the cultural offshoot of the Mercosul trade bloc—which includes Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and formerly Venezuela—the biennial was meant to serve as an index of art from the region, with buildings and institutions throughout Porto Alegre—a large industrial port city—acting as its venues. Although many of the artists hail from South America, there are no boundaries to where the work can be sourced, and the themes throughout its editions have been accommodating of expansive premises and metaphors (“feminine(s)” and “Message from a New America,” to name two recent ones).
The project is typically massive in scale, with this latest edition including over seventy-six artists across eighteen venues. The theme for this edition: “snap,” or estalo. A metaphor that contains a multitude of meanings—a snap of the fingers, whether to music or when an idea is born; a snap to do something; a snap decision. The metaphor was broad enough to accommodate any kind of work included, and each venue purported to collect works that traffic in its differing interpretations. Perhaps even a snap as a moment that defines a before and after—like those defined by the floods? That too, perhaps; but nowhere did it feel like the biennial was responding directly to that particular event.
To judge the biennial in relation to the disasters that preceded it—which occurred midway through its organization—is perhaps a bit unfair. However, it was difficult to determine whether the biennial felt much of a desire to respond to any moment, or to create a space for the profound, profane, or poetic in relation to a moment. There was an overall sense of youthfulness to the projects, and the eliding of major issues in favor of the kind of solipsistic subjectivity and experience that accompanies the young. In the video Garden Amidst the Flame, 2022, by Indonesian artist Natasha Tontey, the protagonist screams “I’m shaving my eyebrows and no one can stop me!” But maybe someone should?
There emerged a feeling that these are artists interested in expressing their place within the world, a world that they might not be disappointed or angry with, but also one that has failed to provide them with any kind of optimism, hope, or desire for the future. The sentiment was captured by a multi-video installation titled Storage Drama, 2021, by Özgür Kar. Displayed on monitors embedded in travel cases, animated skeletons play instruments—a flute, horn, bell—with back, feet, or arms pressed up against the edges of the screen, each seemingly crammed inside their respective suitcase. One rests his head in his hands, another bends to rest their head on their knees; all appear resigned to life within the travel cases; a languid symphonic tune wafted around the room. According to the exhibition texts, the work “materializes existential voids and [marks] the passage of time toward death transposed with delicate theatricality.”
There is still fun to be had with artists such as Fátima Rodrigo creating karaoke stations and dance floors across different venues, or Ad Minoliti’s design of some colorful hangout stations, a carousel-like sculpture by Chico Machado that invited viewers to make noise by pushing it around, and one of Jacolby Satterwhite’s virtual queer landscape installations. Perhaps fun-seeking is the appropriate response to a world in decay. But somehow, that feels unsatisfying. Benches, walls, and didactics were all colored Charli XCX’s Brat chartreuse, a move that, to me, felt like the exhibition-design embodiment of the Steve Buscemi meme “How do you do, fellow kids?” However, credit is due to the organizing team for the sheer number of new commissions, which far outnumbered preexisting works.
Another admirable aspect of the project was its dedication to artists hailing from places like Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, and Paraguay. There was a kind of dichotomy where works included by younger artists or artists from outside of Mercosur were often those whose chosen media and topics subscribed to more conceptual, technical, or expansive themes—contemporaneity expressed through relationships to the digital, for example—while those included from the Global South or of an older generation were often outsider artists, expressing humanity and authenticity through craft or figurative forms of expression.
Perhaps the standout from the show was an installation by Brazilian artist Froiid that was able to combine both those modes. The starting point for the work, Carnavais na Bienal, 2025, is Frevo, 1964, a folksy painting of a street scene depicting a quintet of colorful dancers by Heitor dos Prazeres (1898–1966), the late musician, composer, samba practitioner, and painter. Froiid fed the painting into an AI image generator and outputted one hundred illustrations that drew from the elements of dos Prazeres’s painting to create new compositions along with a procedurally generated soundtrack. Spread across two rooms, and adjacent to a wall displaying their source, these AI-created offspring were uncanny in their ability to assimilate and replicate the style of dos Prazeres’s original, but also in creating subtly differing variations on it. One might associate generative art with glossy, high-contrast, vaguely surreal or sci-fi imagery, but here it was used to replicate outsider or folk art—genres that could not seem less like a product of the digital and ones that we so often ascribe with directness and authenticity. And yet, shockingly, the artwork felt less like something from a Black Mirror episode than a genuine tribute to dos Prazeres.
The art world, not only its market but the culture it generates, is hardly immune from the machinations of global macroeconomic policies. Today’s art world benefits from a sense of absolute porosity—artists, their work, and the ideas they traffic in migrate freely, and the permanent collections of museum and rosters at galleries reflect the ease with which these have navigated the globe. To imagine an end to our era of art globalization seems impossible, perhaps just as unthinkable as living in a world devoid of the ease provided by cheap goods that are always a click away. Lula is eighty and the next election is in 2026. We know how this goes after our own return to the right and the championing of isolationism and protectionism. Let’s hope the price of Brazilian eggs holds.
