Marcos Chaves

Since the 1980s, Marcos Chaves' art practice has evolved through a diverse array of works and projects. His repertoire spans various media and mediums, including text, sound and video installations, assemblages, photography, and site-specific projects.

Biography of Marcos Chaves

Marcos Chaves was born in 1961 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He grew up in the Santa Teresa neighborhood, where he still maintains his studio. As a teenager, he was very close to his aunt, Mara Chaves, who worked for architects Wilson Reis Netto and José Zanine Caldas. This connection led him to pursue a degree in architecture and urbanism in 1979 at Universidade Santa Ursula, where he was influenced by Lygia Pape.

Additionally, he took classes at the Visual Arts School of Parque Lage, where many of his peers were either teaching or training and at the Museu de Arte Moderna, where he studied painting under Rubens Gerchman.

In 1984, he traveled to Italy and studied art history while working as an assistant to the Italian comic artist and satirist Francesco Tullio Altan. While in Italy, he encountered Antonio Dias, a significant figure in Brazilian contemporary art, who invited him to work as his assistant in Milan. During this time, he was introduced to Arte Povera artists and aesthetics, which became another inspiration for his later work.

Upon returning to Brazil in 1985, he met Leonilson, a prominent artist in the Brazilian art scene, and they began regularly discussing art. Together, they experimented with four-hand paintings. During this period, Chaves developed a studio practice and began creating his first assemblages and object-based works, marking a shift in his focus from painting to the conceptual, language and text-based, and photographic practices that define his current work.

Currently, the artist lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. 

Marcos Chaves' Art Style

Marcos Chaves diverged from a generation of Brazilian artists focused on painting in the 1980s. His work is characterized by the use of diverse mediums, including photography, installation, video, text, and sound. Despite this variety, his body of work remains coherent and deeply critical, allowing for open-ended interpretations while maintaining an underlying tone of humor and irony.

Chaves often appropriates mundane elements of everyday life, bringing them into the spotlight to reveal the extraordinary within the ordinary. His work aligns with a long tradition of artists exploring the relationships between image and written language, frequently using ambiguous or humorous titles with double meanings that play off the objects and their names, prompting deeper reflection from the viewer. His pieces channel insightful and witty observations from daily life, capturing the irony, eccentricity, and absurdity often hidden in the details we might overlook.