— Biografia

Monica Barki was born on October 30^th, 1956 in Rio de Janeiro, where she currently lives and works.  The artist, whose career spans 35 years, makes use of different media to build a diverse visual repertory. Her prints, paintings, photographs, performances, installations pieces, assemblages, videos, machines and objects have been seen in 29 solo shows and about 100 group exhibitions in Brazil and abroad, including the 1991 São Paulo International Biennial. Along this trajectory, Monica Barki’s work has been developed in a singular manner, made up of a far-reaching vocabulary that includes her family history, her memories, the Judaic culture, eroticism, bourgeois upbringing, her children’s everyday life, and the condition of being a woman in society. Barki works her issues with subtle irony and sense of humor, continuously prospecting for new media and techniques to express herself.

Monica grew up in the Rio’s Copacabana neighborhood within a family of Jewish descent who owned a thriving factory and a retail chain for bed, bath and table linen. Since her earliest years, she had been in close contact with her father’s textile company, despite the strict style of her upbringing. Helio Barki, the manufacturer and retailer, had moved with his family, when he was still a boy, from the Turkish town of Izmir to Rio de Janeiro and soon after that he obtained his Brazilian citizenship. He marries a girl of Russian and Rumanian descent with whom he has five children, four girls and a boy. In 1968, at the early age of 12, Monica, the youngest among the girls, is enrolled by her mother, who was concerned about her difficulties in expressing herself, in the classes of renowned Brazilian artist Ivan Serpa. As early as at her pre-teenage years, Monica begins her art studies as a sort of therapy to overcome her shyness.

Four years later, in 1972, encouraged by her sister Cinthia, Monica Barki submits a work to the 4^th Salão de Verão do Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, a summer juried art show held at the prestigious Rio’s Museum of Modern Art. She succeeds in having her work selected for the show and, at 16 years of age, she makes her debut in the art world with a series of three gouaches. Once more at her sister’s suggestion, in the same year, Monica starts attending painting classes at Bruno Tausz’s Studio at Centro de Pesquisa de Arte, located in Ipanema, which is eventually named Centro de Pesquisa de Arte Ivan Serpa (Ivan Serpa Research Center) after the death of that artist. There, sitting at the head of a long table, the teacher, a Serpa’s disciple as well, used to show the students’ pieces and prompt all participants to comment on them.

The encounter with Bruno Tausz would prove decisive in raising young Monica’s self-esteem and helping her artistic trajectory take off. Stimulated by the master, she starts showing some drawings. “Bruno used to say that he was there to listen to me. He expected me to show my own worldview and would say that he didn’t have anything to teach me. Our classes were simply a long, long series of conversations”. In 1976, Monica opens her first solo show, Autorretrato (Self-portrait) at the gallery of the Centro de Pesquisa, presenting oil paintings and gouaches, besides a Super-8 film. The cover of the invitation card featured a painting of a woman lying naked on a dining table as if she were the main dish of a banquet. At this early moment, one could witness the theme that would become constant in her coming works: the reflection upon women’s condition.

            In 1980, the year when she graduates in Visual Communication and Fine Arts pedagogy from Rio’s PUC- Catholic University, Monica Barki operates on two fronts, as it were. Without relinquishing her interest in hyperrealistic painting, which had fascinated her at shows she had seen in Paris after her first voluntary stay at a kibbutz (1975), she has a regular job at her family’s factory. She designs prints for bed sheets, tablecloths, calendars, she creates new color schemes, designs the shop windows of the stores, makes advertising posters and in this daily coexistence with her father, becomes very close to him. Impatient at the long time his daughter needs to finish every painting, he used to say that she took longer to paint a single picture that he would do to churn out 10,000 kitchen cloths.

In the same year, motivated by the comments from her father and, also, for feeling lonely at her studio, Monica enrolls in the lithography classes of Antonio Grosso, at Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro. “Besides looking for ways out of my isolation, I also intended to expand my production and learn a new technique, which ended up filling me with great pleasure”. Her printing lessons opened the door to her recognition. Surrounded by loud controversy and mentioned, even today, every time one talks or writes about the work of Barki, the show Álbum de família – litografias (Family Album – lithographs) is presented in 1982, at Galeria César Aché, in Rio de Janeiro. The set of 16 black and white lithographs was inspired by the work of American photographer Diane Arbus, who had committed suicide in 1971. Like Arbus, Monica also highlighted the psychological aspects of the sitters, most of them in photos culled from old boxes kept at her parent’s home, where she still lived. The artist would add subtle details to the portraits, thus making subtle though biting comments on the institution of family. The show was banned, one of the pieces was seized and Monica was sued by some of her relatives. Today, some lithographs of that series are part of the prestigious collections of Gilberto Chateaubriand at Rio’s Museum of Modern Art, and João Sattamini, at the Contemporary Art Museum of Niterói, at the collections of Museu Nacional de Belas Artes of Rio de Janeiro and Fundação Cultural de Curitiba.

In 1982, Monica Barki marries lawyer and music therapist Tomaz Lima. Pregnant with her first son Bhagavan and deeply shaken by the lawsuit filed against her, she emigrates with her husband to Israel. The couple settles at a kibbutz located between Tel Aviv and Haifa. During the two following years, Monica works in several community jobs, including that of a cook, a gardener, a children’s tutor, and a night security guard, without being able to reconcile motherhood and art. In her free time, she works in a makeshift studio in a chicken house. Back to Brazil, in 1986, she moves to Niterói, a town across the bay of Rio, where her second child, Esther, is born. Only then does she decide to resume her career. She contacts the painter Luiz Aquila, whom she knew from her days at the lithography course at Parque Lage, and is advised by him to enrol in the ceramics workshop of Celeida Tostes, which actually marked the beginning of her experience with tridimensionality.

One year later, she separates from Tomaz Lima and works cathartically in order to make up for the six fruitless years. In 1988 she marries Luiz Aquila. The couple and the two children by her first marriage start living in the picturesque town of Petrópolis and there, in the peace and quiet of a studio amidst nature, she produces intensely. In this serene phase of her career, colorful garden hoses start being used in abstract, playful works which remind of her children’s toys and games. “The garden hose was the duct that connected me back to art, to people and to the world”. From this moment on, the painter Luiz Aquila, just like her master Bruno Tausz had done in the late 70’s, would provide most of the encouragement for the career of his wife, by adding new issues to the experiments of the artist. The rediscovery of colors is an example of that. Monica Barki starts using vibrant colors, which had not been part of her work so far. In 1991, she takes in the 21^st São Paulo Internacional Biennial, showing her series Novos Jogos Geométricos (New Geometric Games) a set of five playful pieces with which the public could interact by fitting pieces of color garden hoses into large panels, as if the whole thing were a big toy.

In the following years, the continues working on playful projects, turning out abstract paintings with brushstrokes which would grow more and more unrestrained and colorful, until, in 1994, the human figure from her initial phases resumes its place in her repertory. It is after a trip to London, in 1995, that her work makes a distinctive turn toward tridimensionality. This turn starts with the series Caixas-objetos (Box-Objects), influenced by the show Worlds in a box, a group exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Simultaneously to this, the artist goes on creating paintings to which she transfers the same visual elements used in the boxes, such as the little jewel-box piano from her childhood. In 1999, Monica Barki breaks with the rectangular shape of the boxes and starts her series of assemblages. She culls pieces of fabric with different patterns, broken toys, necklaces, shards of ceramics and dishes, reels of cotton, and pieces of clothing that belongs to her family to create organic, visceral forms on cut-out wooden frames. The show Collarobjeto was presented at the Centro Cultural Recoleta, in Buenos Aires, at Galeria Nara Roesler, in São Paulo and at Paço Imperial, in Rio de Janeiro, between 2000 and 2001.

From 2002 on, Monica Barki resumes her graphic research, exploring several printing techniques. At that time, she was a member of a study group led by critic and curator Fernando Cocchiarale about the work of Walter Benjamin, especially The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. The ideas championed by the influential philosopher incites the artist to new queries which start precisely when she spots, by sheer chance, in a stationery shop in her neighborhood, a logo printed on wrapping paper in a bobbin. Her discovery of flexography, a relief printing technique that uses photopolymer plates, gives origin to the series Bobinas, whose inspiration comes from popular culture and particularly, the universe of Cordel literature. Searching for references for the work in process, she leaves her studio and widens the field of her research. She takes pictures at the São Cristóvão Fair in Rio de Janeiro, a meeting point for migrants from the poorer states of Northeastern Brazil, and the façades and small signs of roadside “greasy spoons”. On a vacation trip to the Northeast, she visits the Museu dos Mamulengos in Olinda.

Back to her Petrópolis studio, deeply impressed by the expressiveness of the puppets she had seen in Pernambuco, Monica Barki creates the character Ana C., also the title of the show held at the Galeria de Arte Ibeu in Rio de Janeiro, in 2003. The giant puppet, which is featured in bobbins, bandages, photographs and performances, belongs to a Brazil that had been absent from the artist’s vocabulary up to that point, thus widening her comments on gender issues towards those women who subject  body, soul, sex and freedom of choice to male economical dominance. The same idea unfolds in Ana C. e outras histórias (Ana C. and other stories), a series that results in the show presented at the Galeria Anna Maria Niemeyer, also in Rio de Janeiro, in 2006.

2008 was a period of ruptures for Monica Barki. Her marriage with Luiz Aquila ends, she leaves the isolation of Petrópolis and moves her studio to Barrinha, the oldest area in the now fashionable Barra da Tijuca neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro. In 2009, she produces her first post-rupture work, registering on video the performance Vermelho sobre branco (Red on white), which alludes to the changes in her life as a woman and artist. This video, which shows her and a female friend in a fight, throwing half a ton of ripe tomatoes at each other, ends up being the springboard to her latest series Lady Pink et ses garçons. Returning to drawings again, Monica works and re-interprets with several kinds of pencils, crayons, dry and oily pastel a set of scenes culled from home videos from YouTube whose common content is women that physically subjugate men out of sheer pleasure. Those women who seemed to be oppressed, like in Ana C. e outras histórias, turn up as a domineering force now.  The exhibition Lady Pink et ses garçons is presented, along with the video, at Galeria Anna Maria Niemeyer, Rio de Janeiro, and at Casa da Cultura da América Latina in Brasília, in 2010.

Monica Barki’s current work continues reflecting the creative vigor of her first years and incorporating an increasing variety of supports and interests. It is through this multiplicity that the artist carries out her search for “visual aspects that can be heard”.