Germana Monte-Mór was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1958 and earned a Visual Arts degree from FAAP in 1989. Before that she had already concluded Anthropology at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Perhaps this extensive background explains the self-assured, direct, and simple character that her work acquired from the early 1990s onwards. Very briefly, she has always sought ways of drawing lines on paper to demarcate regions with areas of both approximation and distancing.

So the proximity-distancing opposition has been the most constant element of articulation in her work. Narrow fissures emerging between forms also indicate distance between different bulks that seem to be expanding outside the drawings. Even when close to each other, these forms do not communicate fully but are alone and lost in innermost thought. They are placed alongside each other rather than being together. They are not more closely together, one might think, because they are already as close as they can be. As if each form were an individual, in its isolation, and within its boundaries. But nonetherless seeking to approach others.

As weel as two very large drawings in asphalt on paper, this exibition contains three new series of works. In the sculptures, the white paper of the drawings takes on the physiognomy of a rectangular block of marble, white black forms become volumes that are sinuous and faceted at the same time in a surprising transposition of her poetics from drawings to space. The usually serene air of her drawings is trasfigured into different moods in her sculpture: graceful and ungainly, understated and ouverstated, discerning and capricious…

Also surprising is the poetic expansion her drawing gain in the panel as subtle and varied colors take the place of white. Three types of designs combined following different spatial orientations are arrenged in a kind of emotional map. As in her sculptures, they move from one opposite to another with ease: from refined to rough, ironic to serene, pretty to peculiar… In both sculptures and panel, the strains and oppositions of her previous drawings are expanded. And the “being alongside” is enriched by feelings not previously communicated by her works.

Drawings comprised of lines alone, with no areas, in the third series of works show the contrary – her poetics distilled to a minimum. Each drawing speaks, then, of few things, small encounters, or dis-encounters, not of crowds. In one way or another, however, the works of Germana Monte-Mór are always precise metaphors of our condition, both gregarious and solitary at the same time. Our lives similar and assimilated, but all with their unique destinies.