Iran do Espirito Santo

Iran do Espírito Santo (b. 1963, Mococa, São Paulo, Brazil) lives and works in São Paulo. He studied Art Education at the Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado (FAAP) in São Paulo, graduating in 1986. Shortly afterwards, he moved to London, where he lived for two years. His early international experience also included an artist residency in Winnipeg, Canada, in 1991, and a residency at the Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, United States, in 1993. ([Itaú Cultural](https://www.itaucultural.org.br/)) Espírito Santo’s practice encompasses sculpture, installation, drawing, engraving, and wall-based works. His sculptures frequently begin with simple, recognisable objects and forms drawn from everyday life, which he transforms through changes of scale, material, and context. Cans, containers, glasses, and other familiar forms are rendered with an extreme degree of formal precision in materials including stainless steel, granite, marble, glass, and other stones. Through this process, objects are separated from their ordinary functions and become studies of form, visibility, material, and perception. A central aspect of his work is the relationship between an object and its ideal or abstract form. As described by MAXXI, his sculptures and installations examine the relationship between reality and abstraction, while the recognition of an incongruity between material and form becomes part of the viewer’s perceptual experience. His works therefore often operate through a tension between the familiarity of the source object and the precision and unfamiliarity of its transformed appearance. Since the late 1980s, Espírito Santo has also produced installations that intervene directly in exhibition spaces, as well as drawings and paintings on walls. His practice has been presented extensively in Brazil and internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo, the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, MAXXI in Rome, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He represented Brazil at the 48th and 52nd Venice Biennales, the 19th, 28th and 30th São Paulo Biennials, and the 6th Istanbul Biennial. His work is held in major international collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and MAXXI in Rome, as well as collections of museums in Brazil, the United States, and Europe. In 2006, MAXXI presented a major exhibition of his work, subsequently shown at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo. The exhibition brought together sculptures, installations, and wall works that demonstrated the artist’s sustained investigation of perception, form, and the relationship between objects and the spaces in which they are encountered.