Since Rocio SantaCruz first presented her work in Europe at Paris Photo 2018, Palmira Puig-Giró's work has been integrated into important international collections. MoMA (Museum of Modern Art, New York) will include her photographs in the exhibition...
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Since Rocio SantaCruz first presented her work in Europe at Paris Photo 2018, Palmira Puig-Giró's work has been integrated into important international collections. MoMA (Museum of Modern Art, New York) will include her photographs in the exhibition Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946-1964 in March 2021.
A rediscovered signature
For decades, Palmira Puig-Giró was known as the muse of her husband, the photographer Marcel Giró. It wasn't until 2018 that Rocío Santa Cruz, delving into Giró's family collection with Toni Ricart, Marcel's nephew, discovered two photographic languages, two distinct, yet intertwined, authorships coexisting in the photographer's archives. Retracing the trail of this unknown signature, they came to the following conclusion: not only was Palmira the author of an important body of work of her own, but Marcel's authorship itself was now taking on a new meaning. The story of the artist and his muse became obsolete and gave way to a more complex, more horizontal, richer narrative. The two artists shared camera, film, and sets; each with their own distinct perspective.
The faces of the avant-garde
Palmira Puig-Giró, along with Gertrudes Altschul, Menha S. Polacow, Barbara Mors, and Dulce G. Carneiro, was one of the few women who formed part of the Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante, a collective of avant-garde photographers based in São Paulo. Her work articulates an experimental corpus of portraits and landscapes, where metaphor and social critique are framed in a single shot. Puig-Giró's photography draws on avant-garde photography and black and white contrasts, but her style has a more humanist tone than that of her São Paulo colleagues. While they tended to sublimate the abstract, the pure moment of visual interruption, Puig-Giró goes beyond the instant and the object. The photographer broadens her vision to show the surroundings of her photographs, the faces, stories, and memories of the places she travels with her camera, and brings everyday life and gestures to an aesthetic level as meticulous as it is poetic.
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