This time 50 years ago in the northeastern Brazilian city of Recife, Nara Roesler began showing José Cláudio’s work from her home, initially selling it to friends of her parents. Then 27, she was presenting works by José Cláudio da Silva—her close friend—at an informal art show consisting mainly of her parents’ friends, who were for the most part entirely unfamiliar with the artist. “But I spoke with such enthusiasm—the work was very good—that I started selling,” Roesler told CULTURED earlier this month. “Nowadays, there isn’t any home in the city that doesn’t have one José Cláudio, or several.”
That same year, Roesler embarked upon a career that eventually became her eponymous gallery, a showing of works by legacy Brazilian artists including Aloisio Magalhães and Lula Cardoso Ayres. Half a century, three gallery locations, a nonprofit, and a publishing house later, Roesler remains at the forefront of spreading the country’s contemporary art scene across the international circuit. She introduced towering figures like Vik Muniz, Tomie Ohtake, and Abraham Palatnik to American collectors, and was the first Brazilian gallerist to open a location in New York.
Roesler regards her operation as a family matter, leading it today alongside her sons, Daniel and Alexandre Roesler, and Fabiola Ceni, with spaces in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and New York. This year, Daniel, in collaboration with artistic director Luis Pérez-Oramas and other friends of the gallery, presents “50 anos,” a series of six exhibitions spanning Nara Roesler’s three locations. Featuring pieces from artists Roesler has championed over the years, the program celebrates his mother’s pioneering link between the Brazilian and global art markets.
To commemorate the gallery’s semi-centennial, Nara sat down with her son to reminisce on installing a swimming pool for an exhibition, moving to São Paulo for love, and the artists and journalists she leaned on while become Brazil’s leading art market voice.
I’d love to go all the way back to the beginning. Nara, when did you first know that you wanted to be a gallerist?
Nara Roesler: I didn’t. I wanted to be a doctor. I’d already been in contact with art because my grandfather was the dean of the University of Recife and the director of the Escola de Belas Artes. I was the eldest granddaughter, and I was always with him when I was a kid, visiting the studios of the artists. My father and my mother were also collectors. But I never thought about doing a gallery.
When I met José Cláudio, I had a passion for his work. Through his work I was able to get to know parts of the art society, day-by-day, of the people. His work was not complaining about existence but celebrating it. I was in love, and he asked me if I could represent him. There was no gallery. I said yes, and I started showing him in my house. The clients at that time were my parents’ friends, not my friends, because I was so young. At that age, people don’t have money to buy art.
I realized I should professionalize, and it could not be done inside my house. I rented this white cube to do the gallery. I started showing the artist in a very professional way—doing catalogs, having a program, doing exhibitions. The journalists would come and write about the artist, about the show.
What was the art and gallery scene like in Brazil at the time?
Nara: In my city, which is in the northeast of Brazil, there were no galleries—only one that worked with modern figurative artists. But there was an art scene. At this time, 50 years ago, the world was so far away. There was no Internet or art magazines. So there was a group of artists in Recife who united themselves like a community—an artist community that informed each other about what they were doing in art and [their] techniques. There was nothing to interfere in their world. The United States was so far away. So they exchanged information between themselves, and each time they managed to sell one piece, the money came back to the group, so they could buy more canvas, more paints. Then, we published a book about this movement. We also showed the artists from this generation at the gallery.
Brazil is so huge; it’s like the United States. It’s so different from North to South, from small communities to great cities. I wanted to connect these Brazils. So I invited artists from the South, like Iberê Camargo; from the center, like Siron Franco; and most of them from São Paulo. I started showing artists from Brazil that no one knew, not even in New York.
At the same time, I used to invite curators or journalists to come to Recife to see the artistic scene. I would reunite a group of 10 or 12 people to show them around, and they’d go back to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo with a stronger idea about the vitality of the art of the northeast of Brazil. The great art critic and journalist Frederico Morais, of O Globo, wrote a whole page about the vitality of the art in the northeast. It was a very good way to let my artists be known in Brazil.
Do you feel like you were tapping into a preexisting community, or do you feel like you had to build one from the ground up?
Nara: The artists’ community existed already. I joined them with collectors and journalists. I was also trying to show outside Recife what we were doing there because São Paulo didn’t know Recife. Now they do, a little bit. Recife has great writers, great poets, great musicians. It’s a very cultured city.
Daniel Roesler: It’s a region with a long tradition of culture, but it’s a smaller economy. In Brazil, Rio has been the center of the diffusion of ideas; that was the capital of Brazil, and it was where the TVs were, so everything would go from Rio to the rest of the country. Then, São Paulo grew into a massive economic center. Nowadays I think it’s more decentralized because of technology— people are seeing things from different perspectives. But at that time it was very homogenizing.
Nara: São Paulo and Rio were looking for the U.S. much more than the northeast. We were more isolated. We were so rich in art and culture that it circulated only there.
Daniel: The [São Paulo] Biennial started in the early ’50s. It’s one of the oldest biennials, right after Venice. There’s one every two years. Art from different parts of Brazil was put together, but there was a very big bias toward artists from Rio and São Paulo, because they were closer to the curators.
There was also this influx of international art into Brazil, at a time when the country was very closed. You wouldn’t see many international exhibitions or a lot of information from outside. But the Biennial was very important in bringing new ideas and mixing it up, leaving ideas to sit for two years until other things would come and develop in interesting ways in Brazil.
When you think back to your early years, who are some of the artists you most associate with that time?
Nara: In Recife at that time, Francisco Brennand, a painter and sculptor; Gilvan Samico, a great engraver; and José Cláudio. Those were really my favorites. When I moved to São Paulo, 10 years after opening the gallery in Recife, I brought those three artists with me to Galeria Montesanti, where I was working.
Why did you decide to move to São Paulo?
Nara: It was very personal. I was in love with a guy from this city—a Paulista. I was divorced, so I came to live in São Paulo. It wasn’t for market purposes, and it wasn’t planned. I’m a very passionate person. Sometimes I see something and I grab it.
What was the change like for you?
Nara: It was very hard for me to start again. Recife was my hometown, where I knew everybody, every collector. And here in São Paulo, although I knew many of the artists because I had invited them to Recife, I didn’t know any collectors. It was very hard. But slowly they started to come, and I started to meet them.
Was it a challenge, going from a gallery that was your own to working with others?
Nara: A little bit, because a gallery is very personal. But it wasn’t challenging. I was in a partnership and group.
Daniel: It was a short-lived partnership.
Nara: Then I went out on my own with my gallery in São Paulo, doing my own program. I always liked to invite curators I trust to construct the program of the gallery together. Frederico Morais and I constructed a one-year program here in São Paulo. He introduced me to Abraham Palatnik, one of the most important artists I represent. He was a kinetic artist. He was in the first São Paulo Biennial.
I always had this mind [for] teaching, so we decided to make a journal for the gallery. For instance: Palatnik was a kinetic artist, so he wrote a paper talking about what kinetic art is, which artists were doing kinetic art here and in the world. We did 10 issues. There was no sponsorship for my conditions. There was no sponsorship, but we did it.
When you think of that era, the ’80s and ’90s, are there any specific shows that come to mind that you’re most proud of?
Nara: I did a very important show here of Francisco Brennand: his ceramics, which weren’t well known here, although he’s a giant. At that time we had to put the gallery on hold because we were doing a renovation. When we started building the setting for this exhibition, the Cruzado Plan [an economic package that froze prices and wages] happened in Brazil. The government confiscated everybody’s money. It was very hard.
Another very important exhibition we did here in São Paulo was building a swimming pool inside the gallery for Hélio Oiticica. Imagine a swimming pool in the middle of the city, inside the gallery, with sounds and projections and everything. It was a huge success. If it exploded, it would have damaged all the works.
Daniel: In 1987, there was a radiological accident in Goiânia—a piece of medical equipment, which had radioactive material in it, was carelessly discarded. Garbage pickers opened the equipment and found this material. It would glow in the dark. It was very beautiful, and people touched it and spread it. It was a major tragedy in Brazil, because a number of people died. This artist Siron Franco, who was from the region of this incident, did a series of paintings around it.
Nara: He also did sculptures with a piece of this radioactive material inside blocks of concrete, which I agreed to exhibit here in São Paulo. It was called Annunciation.
What do you think is the biggest way the art world in Brazil has changed?
Nara: The art world in Brazil has become more open, because the museums are doing more exhibitions. There was the biennial, and then there was a fair. In São Paulo we’ve had over 20 years of the SP-Arte fair. It was very good for developing the market—more galleries showing different work, being more professional.
Here at the gallery, I always tell my team: if someone enters the gallery, they’re interested in art. So you have to stand up, meet the person, try to explain. Maybe they don’t want to be explained to. But when you try to open a window, the person enters, and it’s like a bacteria—an art bacteria—and you’re contaminated forever.
Once I was standing in front of the gallery door on a Saturday. The neighbor was a car shop, with lots of people inside. And in front of the gallery, some people on the walkway were looking inside the gallery, but they were afraid to come in. So I went to the walkway and said, “Please come, you can enter, come see.” Many of them told me, “Oh, thank you—I didn’t know how to enter a gallery. I didn’t know if I had to know about art. I didn’t know if I had to buy.” So in many cases, art galleries are more important than museums, because when we do a very good exhibition, we talk to everybody, we write about the exhibition. It’s very democratic.
Daniel: And it’s free. I think this kind of illustrates the changes in the market. Fifty years ago, it was a very limited, small niche thing to collect art. As time went by, with the work of the gallery—not only our gallery, but other galleries too—tried to make it more democratic, to get more people to understand what art is about, to feel it, to experience it.
Together with a similar movement in the institutions, and the opening up of the country, and the fair phenomenon, not only in Brazil, but everywhere, I think it made the market much wider. Nowadays it’s much closer to the lives of a much larger number of people who are really exposed to it—who are contaminated by art, and are active spreaders.
What do you think is the biggest difference between the U.S. and Brazilian art markets and collectors?
Daniel: I was more in the U.S.—Nara can speak more to Brazil. I think the Brazilian collectors trust the gallery very much. We have very direct access to the collecting community in Brazil, and that community is still very much focused on Brazilian art, mostly because it’s very hard to import art from other places. The infrastructure of the Brazilian market is closed off, with high taxes on imports. This helps create very sophisticated local collections, and collectors feel like, if they’re trying to build the best collection they can, they have an edge in collecting the best examples of Brazilian art, rather than competing with international collectors for the same art everyone’s buying internationally.
Nara: More recently, Brazilian collectors have started buying international art too, but that’s a way to create bridges and connections between the two.
Daniel: We’ve been helping expand this idea in Brazil by bringing international artists into our program for many years now. In the U.S., it’s a very different situation. It’s a super open, enormous marketplace, with artists from everywhere, very different sensibilities, and great art. We decided we wanted to keep our focus long term—opening a space for the artists we’ve been working with and believe in, mostly the Brazilian artists. Collectors in the U.S. are super open—they’ve been coming to the gallery and supporting our program. Not only the collectors, but institutions and curators too.
Nara: Many institutions in New York.
Daniel: I feel like there’s more adventure in New York—people are open to learning in different ways. Collectors in America, I feel, are also quicker to make decisions, and then stick to them, than collectors in other places. We’ve been building our community in New York of collectors who’ve been following the program and supporting what we do.
Nara: It takes time.
Daniel: We can’t really become part of the local scene without the component of time. I think that’s just something that has to happen.
Nara: Time and quality, for many years. That’s the key.
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