PRESS RELEASE

Contact: Keith Roberts | M: 07771 544916 | E: keith@keith-roberts.org.uk

Or Amanda Stücklin | M: 07789 007780 | E: Amanda@stucklin.com

Or Susan Pratt | M: 07711 939050 | E: pca@prattcontemporaryart.co.uk

Ana Maria Pacheco Sculpture: Norwich 2015

From Tuesday 17 March 2015

Four separate but simultaneous exhibitions, in four different Norwich locations, bring major

sculptural work from Brazilian-born artist, Ana Maria Pacheco, to Norwich for the first time.

Curated for Norfolk Contemporary Art Society, in association with Pratt Contemporary and

in partnership with Norwich University of the Arts, Norwich Cathedral, Norwich Castle

Museum & Art Gallery and The Cathedral of St John the Baptist, Norwich, these four major

exhibitions will explore the sculpture of Ana Maria Pacheco produced over the last four

decades. Supported by Arts Council England.

Ana Maria Pacheco The Banquet, 1985 Sculpture, polychromed wood 183 x 400 x 250 cm

Although she has strong local connections to Norwich, the sculptor, Ana Maria Pacheco, was born in

Brazil. Following degrees in both Art and Music, she taught and lectured for several years at

Universities in Goiás before coming to London in 1973 on a British Council Scholarship to the Slade

School of Fine Art. Since 1973 she has lived and worked in England. From 1985-9 she was Head of

Fine Art at Norwich School of Art (now NUA), the first woman to hold such a post in the UK. In 1999

she received the prestigious Ordem do Rio Branco from the Brazilian Government. She received an

Honorary Degree from the University of East Anglia and in 2003 was made a Fellow of University

College London. From 1997 to 2000 she was Associate Artist at the National Gallery, London (the

first sculptor to hold the post), a residency that culminated in a major exhibition of her work that

toured on to further venues in the UK. She currently lives and works in London and Kent.

The variety of Pacheco’s sculptural work is remarkable and with its tough humanist core, her project

constantly provokes us to seriously question the true extent of our own humanity, and of our uses

and abuses of power. Her work shows us how vulnerable we are. Large and enduring themes;

violence, journeys, death, love, transformation and metamorphosis reflect her high seriousness, but

at the same time her work is neither pompous nor devoid of humour. With a cast of characters that

are betrayed, tortured, ecstatic, seductive, grotesque, bestial or divine, her work can arouse extreme

emotions, a process that some concluded art no longer has the power to elicit.

The four venues showing her work have all got important associations for the artist. The two Norwich

cathedrals reflect her upbringing in a Brazilian household with a catholic father and a protestant

mother. The old Norwich School of Art, now NUA, was where she arrived to become Head of Fine Art,

and the Castle was where she had a major exhibition that included Man and His Sheep and where

she encountered Francis Cheetham and his alabaster reliefs. What follows are some notes on the

work that can be seen in each of the four exhibition venues, highlighting the Norwich connections

and the complex inter-relationships between the works.

At The Gallery, at Norwich University of the Arts

The Banquet (1985) is a large polychromed wood sculpture, completed the same year the artist

moved to Norwich, when she was appointed by Bill English to succeed Ed Middleditch as Head of

Fine Art at what was Norwich School of Art, now NUA. Pacheco was also awarded an Honorary

Doctorate by the University in 2002 for her services to Fine Art and the University is very pleased to

welcome her back to Norwich, especially as they celebrate their 170^th anniversary this year. The

Banquet has not previously been exhibited here in the City and it will be shown in The Gallery at NUA

together with a related contextual work: Box of Heads (1983) – a loan from Towner, Eastbourne. The

other half of the gallery will be dedicated to more recent large-scale graphic works including Dark

Event I-VII (2007)—making a connection to the sculpture in the Cathedral— An Ancient Dark Night

Descended Upon My Soul I & II Drypoint, 2010-12 and Burial, 2014. Smaller works will include a new

portfolio of ten drypoints, The Miraculous Journey of a Little Vixen (2014), with an accompanying text

by Marius Kociejowski.

The enormous seated black figures in The Banquet, taller than the standing viewers, compel them to

join in, complicitly completing the circle around the defenceless offering lying on the table. With their

sharp teeth and without necks, these are dark, formidable and threatening figures. And yet there is

still a playfulness, a dry sense of humour about the work that reflects on the contradictions the artist

feels about her migration, and her complex cultural inheritance.

Pacheco left Brazil in 1973, some time after the military regime had taken power in 1964, and many

years before democracy was restored in the late 80s. The totalitarian repression affected artists,

journalists and other civilian occupations. Vivian Schelling has written about the background to The

Banquet:

“In The Banquet the figures have been equipped with a set of real teeth which are sharp and jut out

from under the lips in a bestial manner. This virtual coming to life of the figure blurs the boundary

between art and life and renders the vision of human relationships as a mutual devouring particularly

Ana Maria Pacheco Box of Heads (Studies for The Banquet Sculpture), 1983

Polychromed Wood, 92 x 71 x 18 cm.

On loan from Towner, Eastbourne

disturbing. Cannibalism as a metaphor for human relationships is a central theme in Brazilian cultural

history. It was originally developed in the ‘Cannibalist Manifesto’ in the 1920s by the Modernist poet

Oswald de Andrade. Using the image of the ‘cannibalist’ Indian as a metaphor for the relationship

between the coloniser and the colonised, it proposed that Brazil overcame its perennial cultural

dependence on Europe by ‘devouring’ what Europe had to offer but in the process adapting to its

local conditions.”

At Norwich Cathedral

Ana Maria Pacheco Shadows of the Wanderer, 2008 Sculpture, polychromed wood 260 x 390 x 605 cm

Shadows of the Wanderer is a large polychromed wood sculpture on a raised wooden base and it will

be installed in the Cathedral’s North Transept. It comprises ten over life-size figures, each carved

from a single lime tree, that crowd close together and stand as looming shadows behind a young

man carrying an older man on his back. The group recalls the tale of Aeneas, who carries his father

Anchises from the ruins of burning Troy, but it also powerfully resonates with contemporary issues,

particularly those of exile, asylum, migration and the displacement of people. First shown at the

Aldeburgh Festival, it was later shown at St John’s Church, Waterloo as part of their Faith, Justice,

City project in 2010, and Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, had this to say about the

work in a sermon at the church,

“The young man at the front of the sculpture group, fleeing from something we cannot see, carries

nothing but his father - his past, his identity - and it was I think a stroke of genius that Ana Maria has

carved both father and son out of the same piece of wood. This man literally cannot leave his past

behind, but must take it with him. And that young man is about to step off the plinth and be among

us. How are we going to react? Now, today, as this displaced man and his family arrive in our

church? What will we do? Will we behave with justice and with love?” The work will remain in the

Cathedral for six months.

In Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery

Ana Maria Pacheco Enchanted Garden 2014 Relief, Alabaster, tempera and gold leaf, 30 x 25 x 6 cm

Enchanted Garden, a new series of eight polychromed and gilded alabaster reliefs, reflects the

artist’s long interest in the famous medieval alabasters in the V&A and in the Castle’s collection and

her friendship with the late Francis Cheetham, Head of the Museum, who wrote the definitive book,

English Medieval Alabasters. This will be the first public showing of these recently completed works

and they can be seen on the balcony of the Norman Keep alongside some of the Castle’s own

alabasters.

As the artist has remarked, reliefs are peculiar objects,. Unlike in a conventional sculpture she had to

worry about a background and deal with an implicit frame. She is using very traditional techniques;

gilding and gypsum based tempera paints, applied as thin glazes, decorate the surface of the

alabaster, a soft, delicate and amorphous material. The subject for the whole Enchanted Garden

series is the artist’s homage to the power of the human imagination. The unicorn figure recalls Rilke’s

famous idea in Sonnets to Orpheus, that it was the vivid imagining alone of the unicorn that finally

made it appear; it is not real but it exists! Pacheco grew up in a landscape in Goiás that was wild and

magical too, and this rich landscape of mythical creatures appears in other works such as her Sheba

and Solomon series of prints and paintings.

In the Cathedral of St John the Baptist

A large head in Portland stone, Study for Requiem (John the Baptist I), 1989, will be exhibited in the

North Aisle of the Nave. John the Baptist is one of the most popular subjects for paintings over

hundreds of years and is also the subject of numerous baroque sculptures, often stripping the

subject down to his head alone. In a Cathedral whose patron is such a familiar figure in Christian

iconography, it is often easy to forget that the abuse of power wielded by Herod that led to the

beheading of John the Baptist is not just a familiar biblical story that prefigured Christ’s death but has

contemporary relevance. The recent appalling use of ritual beheadings by Islamic State reminds us

that death squads, regicide and French revolutionaries are nothing new and that abuses of power are

a constant presence in our dangerous world. The calm, almost serene portrayal in this stone version

of the martyr’s head reasserts an underlying humanity and reverence for life, while in contrast,

another version, Study of Head (John the Baptist III), will be placed for a period, excluding Easter, on

top of the font. More grizzly, yet more domestic in scale, this version has the severed head on a

primitive wooden platter, with its blow-torched, charred and chain-sawn hair. Its inspiration lies in the

artist’s experience of Brazilian baroque and Amerindian sculptures. Small and large nails add an echo

of the crucifixion to the hair. This is a revolutionary John, who spoke truth to Herod whose power

then corrupted him.

Ana Maria Pacheco Study for Requiem (John the Baptist I), 1989

Portland Stone, onyx, silver leaf Height: 48.3 cm (excluding base)

Ana Maria Pacheco Study of Head (John the Baptist III)

1992 Sculpture, polychromed wood. 31.8 x 50.8 x 74 cm

Notes to Editors

The four exhibitions are curated by Keith Roberts for the Norfolk Contemporary Art Society

(NCAS), in association with Pratt Contemporary and in partnership with Norwich University

of the Arts, Norwich Cathedral, Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery and The Cathedral of

St John the Baptist, Norwich.

Timetable and Admission Times for the four venues:

The Gallery at NUA: 17 March to 25 April 2015.

The Gallery at NUA will show an early work, The Banquet, made in 1985 and completed in Norwich,

along with a related contextual work and large scale prints.

Tue – Sat, 12 – 5 pm. Closed on Sun and Mon. ADMISSION FREE

Gallery will be closed from Friday 3 April to Wednesday 8 April inclusive.

Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery: 17 March to 31 August 2015.

Norwich Castle will show Enchanted Garden, a brand-new series of eight polychromed alabaster

reliefs, in their Norman Keep.

Mon - Sat: 10 am - 4.30 pm. Sun: 1 - 4.30 pm

Norwich Cathedral: 17 March to 6 September 2015.

In its North Transept, Norwich Cathedral will show the 2008 sculpture, Shadows of the Wanderer.

Daily 7.30 am to 6.00 pm ADMISSION FREE

Recommended visiting times:

Monday to Saturday 9.30 am – 4.30 pm. Sunday 12 noon – 3 pm

The Cathedral of St John the Baptist, Norwich: 17 March to 6 September 2015.

The Catholic Cathedral of St John the Baptist will show Study for Requiem (John the Baptist I), 1989

and Study of Head (John the Baptist III), 1992.

Daily 9.00 am – 6.00 pm ADMISSION FREE (Tours extra)

Study of Head (John the Baptist III) is in the Baptistry from Tuesday 17 March - Sunday 31 May 2015,

excluding Easter weekend and at times when the Baptistry is in use.

Study for Requiem (John the Baptist I) is in the North Aisle of the Nave: Tuesday 17 March - Sunday

6 September 2015

We acknowledge financial support from the following bodies:

Arts Council England

Norfolk Contemporary Art Society

East Anglia Art Fund

Norwich Cathedral Exhibition Fund

Norwich University of the Arts

The John Jarrold Trust

We also acknowledge enormous help and support from Pratt Contemporary

Associated events:

Norwich Castle in partnership with the Norfolk Contemporary Art Society

Ana Maria Pacheco in conversation with Colin Wiggins in the Castle’s Town Close auditorium.

Friday 27 March 2015, 5.30 pm to 7.30 pm

Colin Wiggins is Special Projects Curator at the National Gallery. He is responsible for the Associate

Artist scheme and curated Ana Maria Pacheco's National Gallery exhibition in 2000. Other artists he