The Brazilian artist Regina Silveira introduces the exhibition of her own works, entitled Anamorfas: um estudo sobre as aparências representadas pelos códigos projetivos. She created these works that deal with codes and seemingly simple illustrations by distorting photographic images and perspective drawings. She is mainly interested in distorting both conventional drawings and the apparent fidelity of an illustration of a possible reality. She also aims to test the ability to recognize things once their familiar form and function have been altered. Silveira is fascinated by the illusion of appearances, a game based on the false premise that a photograph is a true and accurate image.      

Anamorfas, the exhibition of works by Regina Silveira (b. 1939), is based on her master’s thesis at ECA-USP (Escola de Comunicações e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo), where she teaches a visual arts course. The exhibition was originally presented at the MAC-USP (Museu de Arte Contemporânea), at the same university, from September 9 through 28, 1980, after which it traveled to the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro. Silveira’s subsequent series, “Simulacros” [see doc. no. 1110656], produced in 1984, was a development of her earlier idea about “dematerialization” (a transgressive approach to the concept of non-objectual art that had emerged in Argentina in the mid-1960s).

Regina Silveira began her career as a painter, printmaker, and draughtswoman in the 1960s in Porto Alegre, the capital of the state of Rio Grande do Sul. A trip to Europe sparked her interest in the potential of geometric forms. As a teacher in Puerto Rico in 1969, Silveira was torn between the development of local handcrafts and her interest in modern means of technical reproduction. During her stay on the Island of Enchantment (Puerto Rico) she also became interested in the so-called “dematerialization” of the object. On her return to Brazil in 1973, she settled in São Paulo. During the 1970s she produced her series Destruturas Urbanas [Urban Destructions], Executivas [Women Executives], and Brazil Today, that use books, albums, and other elements to explore the environment, bureaucracy, and power.  

In the early 1980s the Brazilian critic and art historian Walter Zanini (1925–2013) analyzed Silveira’s work and identified its main features in his article “Regina Silveira e as novas poéticas,” which was published in the catalogue for the exhibition Regina Silveira: obra gráfica 71-77 (Porto Alegre: Pinacoteca do Instituto de Artes; Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul; MEC; Funarte, 1983), and in which he explained the mishmash of temporal discourse and the use of images she appropriates from the field of mass consumption [doc. no. 1110655].