Brazilian artist Tunga opens at Luhring Augustine

New York, NY - Luhring Augustine announces an exhibition of new work by Tunga. This exhibition includes sculptures and drawings conceived over the past few years.

For four decades Tunga has created a complex personal mythology through his integrated and evocative body of work, which includes sculpture, installation, performance, film, drawing, and writing.

Following in the tradition of Joseph Beuys’s ceremonial environments, Tunga relies on a repeated use of symbolic materials such as crystals, sponges, rubber, wood, bronze, glass vessels, and ceramics.

For Tunga, the drawings bring to mind “formulas, recipes, concoctions” and “evoke scenes from pre-scientific iconography where an image can be translated into an element of transmutation”.

As art historian - Michael Asbury - has noted that at the heart of Tunga’s practice lies a “desire to uncover the mystical undercurrents of modernity”.

Born in 1952, Tunga lives and works in Rio de Janeiro and he is considered one of the leading Brazilian artists of his generation.

Most recently, Tunga was included in Brasiliana: Installations from 1960 to the Present at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt am Main, and in Imagine Brazil, which originated at the Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo and will be traveling to several institutions throughout Europe, Russia, and Brazil.