Life, Death and Popcorn
BACI, Washington DC, USA - 2005
Born in Sao Paulo in 1968, Duda Penteado comes from a distinguished family of educators and politicians. Raised in Sao Paulo, a cosmopolitan Brazilian city, early on he came into contact with the most advanced artistic currents if his time and generation. Significantly enough, his multifaceted artistic career has been characterized by drawings of bones and skeletons one of his preferred subjects owing to their architectonic construction.
A resident of the U.S since 1995, Duda has worked at printmaking with Sheila Marbain, in New York a master printer who in turn worked with Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg. Since then he has not stopped growing, experimenting, questioning, and expressing the contradictions and open wounds of our culture
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In his first solo exhibit in Washington, Duda shows his work Beauty for Ashes. Four years after the September 11 tragedy, the artist recalls the shock that changed the world through an artwork that was inspired by Picasso's Guernica. The central piece of this show is a sculpture - memorial created with a chunk of the World Trade Center. That piece of art, in turn, will remain in Washington as a memorial and will be on permanent display at the Brazilian -American Cultur
For his current exhibit, Duda makes use of similar materials, combining drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation, the central piece of which is a chunk of what was left over from the Twin Towers. From the ashes of those buildings is born the artist's commitment to freedom, tolerance, solidarity, and civilization as a whole. At the same time, it expresses the violence and destruction that sadly characterize our culture and the bestiality of man, certainly, the greatest predator, Beauty for Ashes symbolizes the worldwide battle of thoughts and ideas. From his artistic struggle, Duda Penteado comes out endowed with an unshakeable faith in mankind's future.
