The group exhibition Erasure, curated by Victor Gorgulho and presented at Nara Roesler Rio de Janeiro, brings together works by artists from different generations and backgrounds, including artists represented by the gallery as well as guests specially invited for the exhibition. The curatorial proposal is structured around an investigation into the facture of the artwork, emphasizing procedures that reveal dimensions associated with erasure, deletion, subtraction, and excavation.

In the exhibition, the concept is approached in an expanded manner: works in a variety of media reveal different relationships between the artists and their works. At times, we encounter impulses to erase, more or less intensely, surfaces such as canvases; at others, we come across the polish of paintings that, when closely observed, reveal erasure and subtraction as operative strategies within their authors’ practices.

If, in the 1960s, the work of figures such as the American artist Cy Twombly came to establish an extensive and complex creative field in which the investigation of the line, the use of calligraphy, and writing on the canvas—challenging the binary that separates abstraction and figuration—were central, here we bring together works by eighteen Brazilian artists whose distinct practices lead us to reflect on the formal, psychic, political, and, evidently, artistic dimensions that the gesture of erasure, in its multiple possibilities, can encompass.