DIAS SARDENBERG
Helena Dias Sardenberg nasceu em Espírito Santo, mas viveu muitos anos em Los Angeles (EUA) como estilista de moda, criando figurinos para cinema e televisão. Foi durante a temporada nos Estados Unidos, que a artista adquiriu antigos kimonos japoneses, um dos principais materiais que compõem suas telas. Em 2004, a artista iniciou sua produção, primeiro executando o trabalho em almofadas. "Foi o fotógrafo Rômulo Fialdini que me aconselhou a levar minhas criações para as telas", relembra a artista. E assim ela o fez, e na maioria das vezes em telas de grandes dimensões.
Personagens da atualidade, como Dercy Gonçalves, Seu Jorge e Amy Winehouse, além do deserto californiano, o clima de Cannes e o convento da Penha, no Espírito Santo, são temas ou vivências que permeiam a obra da artista. Figuras eróticas, principalmente femininas, também têm grande espaço nas criações.
Brazilian artist Dias Sardenberg’s work has been exhibited at The Museu Afro Brasil in Sao Paulo, Brazil, The Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, in Santiago, Chile, and at various art shows, including NEXT in Chicago, artMRKT in San Francisco and VOLTA in New York City. Her work was featured as the cover of Flaunt Magazine in 2010, which also created a removable poster highlighting some of her most prominent works, the stunning “Hot Coffee” and several images from “The Mocambo Suite” series. Sardenberg earned a Masters in Psychology from Universidade Celso Lisboa in Rio de Janeiro; she worked extensively in fashion between Sao Paulo and Los Angeles, and the colors, textures and designs of the fabrics she handled inspired her to begin painting and using textiles in her mixed media artwork. Sardenberg has spent the last five years at her mountain retreat in Espirito Santo, Brazil, where she moved into sculpture, creating whimsical life-size metal figures, and began a new series of her signature artwork blending collage, painting and surrealism. She recently moved to Southern California, and plans to divide her time between her studios in Brazil and Orange County.
“The sweeping work of young, splashing-making Sao Paulo-based artist Dias Sardenberg mischievously bends the corners of imagistic surrealism and the mystical experience … the artist laterally challenges societal infrastructures and myths via humorous spontaneous collage (mostly notably with intricately embedded vintage Japanese kimono fabric), creating an anachronistic, inventive lushness.”
Flaunt Magazine, Issue 111
“Sardenberg’s figuration is replete with provocations that sometimes are stirred by the metaphysics of surrealism, like a dramatic dream where her characters are shrouded in subconscious mysteries. Sometimes her work acquires aspects of “art brut,” while approaching elements of Pop art, mixing in certain Matissean figuration effects; and then sometimes her work adopts an inflamed discourse as in a whirlwind of passions. The new figuration proposed in her work brings in a lot of innovation; it is a mixture of painting, tapestry, billboard, monumentally large graffiti, and a work that is self-defined by the originality of the multiple ways in which it materializes.”
Emanoel Araujo
Director - Curator
The Museu Afro Brasil
“Mining such diverse sources as art brut, Matissean figuration, popular culture and animist iconography, Sardenberg’s work reveals an anachronistic world of natural order and chaos, teeming with sensuality, mysticism and sophistication.”
Artweek.LA
“The artist’s stated desire to use the typically hidden layers of the kimonos adds a conceptual layer to the images: a reveal, as it were, of the faces or identities hidden beneath the ‘outer layer of one’s public persona.”
Shamim M. Momin
Adjunct Curator for the Whitney Museum of American Art
Founder of the non-profit arts organization LAND
(The Los Angeles Nomadic Division)
“What most attracts and fascinates me in Sardenberg’s work is precisely the way in which she assimilates and translates contemporary issues. This is contemporary art made by an artist who is involved with her time and its social, political, and historical issues.”
Emanoel Araujo
Director - Curator
The Museu Afro Brasil
“Despite the supple, playful content of some of her pieces, there’s a certain kind of physical brutality to the work, a toughness which adds to its emotional heft. Close inspection reveals the focus that re-working these kimonos’ luscious embroidery and patterning into new shapes and forms necessitates. Sardenberg explains that some of the more striking fabric was sheathed beneath exterior layers of kimono, never seeing light until she’d spliced them open.”
Flaunt Magazine, Issue 107