Tunga's exhibition

This autumn, Château La Coste is pleased to present an exhibition by the Brazilian artist Tunga. It will be his first solo exhibition in Europe since his work was presented at the Louvre in 2005. Organised in collaboration with Lisson Gallery, the Instituto Tunga, Luhring Augustine and Millan Gallery it will take place in the Oscar Niemeyer Auditorium, next to the permanent work Psicopompos that the artist created for Château La Coste, in between 2008 and 2011.

A major figure in South American contemporary art, Antônio José de Barros Carvalho e Mello Mourão (known by the pseudonym Tunga) developed a unique body of work, drawing on his enigmatic personality and inspirations from alchemy, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Coming from a family of writers, poets, and activists, Tunga visited France often during his childhood and then developed a close relationship with the country throughout his career.

The exhibition at Château La Coste will pay tribute to the artist's practice and continue the legacy of his work Psicopompos installed on the estate, a piece symbolising his sculptural research in the 1990s in to the energetic relationships between materials. This research led him to introduce magnets into his works and integrate elements from his installations into "instaurations," a term he invented to describe works that had to be activated through performance. These activations required the use of materials such as clay and makeup, alluding to the primitive origins of humans and their relationship to the earth, as well as notions of reincarnation. 

The exhibition will feature around twenty works dating from 2010 to 2016 and will explore the evolution of Tunga’s work towards new materials: the emergence of bells, bottles, chalices, jewellery, teeth, wings, portals, lights, tripods, and thimbles. Among the works on display will be Untitled from 2015, which demonstrates this diversity of materials and uses a plant commonly known as "Saint George's sword" (espadas de São Jorge). In this installation, the plants are accompanied by traditional sword-forging tools, such as an anvil, a hammer, and a water jug used to cool the metal. 

“ Knowing Tunga’s history and work, I can say that the installation carries a deep symbolism that references and venerates Saint George (São Jorge), to whom Tunga was deeply devoted ” explains Antônio Mourão. Since 2016, Mourão has directed the Instituto Tunga, which preserves, conserves, catalogs, and promotes his father’s work and legacy.

In 2005, Tunga made history by becoming the first contemporary artist to hold a solo exhibition within the Pyramid of the Louvre Museum in Paris with A la Lumière des Deux Mondes. 

This work, provocative even at the time, was composed of various symbolically charged objects: notably a giant cane intertwined with braided hair and a dark net filled with skulls falling onto a floor scattered with black and gold reproductions of heads from the Louvre’s classical sculpture collection. Tunga was also the first artist to create a permanent installation for the Inhotim Institute in Brumadinho, Brazil, in 2004: the True Rouge pavilion.

“This is a very special moment for Tunga’s legacy. The Instituto Tunga will organise exhibitions at Château La Coste (France) in September, at Malba (Argentina) in October, and at the Ling Institute (Brazil) in November, highlighting the geographical and cultural reach of Tunga’s influence and his contemporary relevance.” - Antônio Mourão

Exhibition in collaboration with Lisson Gallery, Luhring Augustine and Millan Gallery