Regina Silveira

Regina Silveira (b.1939) was born in Porto Alegre, Brazil and lives in São Paulo. Throughout more than four decades, Silveira, a critical figure in Brazilian conceptual art, has investigated the tension between movement and spatial perspective, threading political meaning into installations that respond to specific sites. In the 1950s she began her artistic training under the tutelage of expressionist Brazilian painter Iberê Camargo, studying lithography and woodcut, as well as painting. Renowned for her parodic explorations of space through geometric constructs, Silveiraʼs work is celebrated for both its conceptual rigor and formal impact.

During the 1970s she experimented with printmaking and video, engaging with the dynamic developments of the Brazilian art world and the country’s politics at a time of military repression. Throughout her career, she has investigated the representation of reality, and the meaning of visual imagery. Her artistic vocabulary includes various methods of perspectival projection, including skiagraphia (the study of shadows) and the appropriation of shadows of ordinary objects to create duality and tension. Silveira is particularly interested in the paradoxical relationship between presence and absence, a notion that she has examined by incorporating tracks and foot imprints into her visual vocabulary. For her, printmaking is an open field for graphic experimentation that also includes video, sculpture, and spacial interventions of architectural proportions.