Bureau is pleased to announce the solo exhibition Quina viva (Sharp corners) by Brazilian artist Eduardo Berliner (b. 1978, Rio de Janeiro). Quina viva is the first solo exhibition by Berliner in the United States, following numerous gallery and institutional shows in his native Brazil. The exhibition will span both floors of the gallery and comprise paintings and drawings in a variety of scales and media. Berliner is a voracious observer and image maker. He mines his own photographic chronicles in and around Rio, as well as develops imagery from his interior life. He draws and paints with an obsessive, diaristic focus, using his pen and brush to translate his personal observations, experiences, and memories.

The exhibition, like Berliner’s oeuvre, has an effusive heterogeneity. Paintings from observation are complemented by more fragmented and disquieting scenes, featuring ensembles of creatures and objects. His works offer a gritty, sometimes fantastical realism. Bodies—parts and whole, human and animal—mingle and intersect with inanimate objects. Even his more austere depictions of everyday objects hold a striking tension. Some works may evoke the gruesome intensity of Goya or Beckmann. However, there is a humanist sensitivity to even the darkest scenes. Many reflect a macabre reverie, like the dark whimsy of children’s fairy tales. Berliner finds inspiration everywhere, even in his surfaces: sometimes he will build a line from the trace of wood grain or along the edge of a discarded textile on the studio wall. Negative expanses of color and form give way to new silhouettes, appearing out of the abstract space. Berliner offers a complex vision, unbounded by the concrete world, ever attuned to the way lived experience morphs into memory and mingles freely with imagination.

I perceive a great power that arises from the borderline territory between what I see and what l imagine; between what the things are and how they function as a mirror of what lives in my thoughts and my memory. But a moment comes during the process when I begin to be guided by the material information on the canvas and by the relationship between my body and the support. I believe that throughout the painting process something unforeseeable needs to happen: it is at these moments that a painting comes into its own.

(Text by Eduardo Berliner)

Eduardo Berliner (b. 1978, Rio de Janeiro; lives and works in Rio de Janeiro) received his Master in Typeface Design from the University of Reading, UK; and a Bachelor of Industrial Design/Visual Communication from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro. Solo exhibitions include Right under my bones, Casa Triângulo, São Paulo, 2023; Eduardo Berliner: Drawings, Museu Lasar Segall, São Paulo, 2022; The shape of the remains, Casa Triângulo, São Paulo, 2019; Corpo em muda, Casa Triângulo, São Paulo, 2016; A presença da ausência, Fundação Eva Klabin, Rio de Janeiro, 2015; Ferrão, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, 2015; Pinturas, curated by Hans-Michael Herzog, Casa Daros, Rio de Janeiro, 2014; Sala a contemporânea, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro 2013. His work was included in the 30th Bienal de São Paulo, curated by Luis Pérez Oramas, São Paulo, 2012. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; K 11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong; Fiorucci Art Trust, London, UK; MALBA, Buenos Aires; Daros Latinamerica AG, Zurich; Coleção Gilberto Chateaubriand/Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro; Coleção Banco Itaú S.A., São Paulo; Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, São Paulo; Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro; and Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo.