We are pleased to invite you to the first Berlin solo exhibition of Brazilian artist Thiago Bortolozzo. Entitled "Transition Zone", Bortolozzo will construct a site-specific installation that spans between the interior and exterior of the gallery alongside a series of new architectural paintings.

This exhibition is kindly supported by the Brazilian Embassy in Berlin.The work of Thiago Bortolozzo oscillates between architecture, sculpture, installation and painting to often invoke an institutional critique. He often experiments with sculpture as exhibition architecture, thereby triggering a friction within the institutional space itself. In his earliest works, Bortolozzo broke with the sterility of the white cube. He is producing precarious structures with cheap materials and revealed the constructive procedures of architecture to exhibit the skeleton of the buildings, as if an inverted body. which revealed a fragility an instability of “Palafiten” and “favelas” (shanty houses) instead of invoking a modernist autonomy and purity of the forms. In another work cycle, the museum and the gallery are understood as places for entertainment. Skate slopes, ramps and bumper cars are on display as art proposing the amusement park as exhibition.

For the exhibition at magnus müller, the adjacency of media questions the limits of of the gallery more purposefully. The spaces of the images of abandoned water parks are extended to the exterior of the gallery, through the construction of a wooden deck, which now spans between exterior and interior. From the outside, the apparent reflection of the sculpture in the window of the gallery is broken by a basin filled with water, a swimming pool in the interior, abolishing the formality of the gallery in exchange for a space of entertainment.

(Dr. Hugo Fortes)

Thiago Bortolozzo was born in 1976 in Campinas, Brazil, and has been living in Berlin since 2008. He studied Fine Arts at the University of São Paulo. "Transition Zone" at magnus müller is his first solo exhibition in Germany. In 2008, he built the set for the play “Die Maßnahme / Mauser” staged by Frank Castorf in the Volksbühne in Berlin. In 2004, he was represented at the Biennial of São Paulo. Parallel to "Transition Zone", the artist will participate in a group show entitled "Deslocamentos - Artistas Brasileiros pelo Mundo"at the Brasilian Embassy in Berlin (opening: September 24, 6:30 p.m.).

For further information, please contact Sönke Magnus Müller or Constanze Korb at the gallery.