JOAQUIM TENREIRO

JOAQUIM TENREIRO (Melo, Gouveia, 1906 - Itapira, 1992).
Untitled, 1960s.
Painted wood.
Signed with initials "J.T." on the upper part.
Size: 93 x 16 x 13,5 cm.
Joaquim Tenreiro ventured into avant-garde sculpture from his experience as an avant-garde designer, arriving at proposals very similar to those of the minimalist artists of the sixties, such as Carl André and Donald Judd. Thus, in pieces such as the one in question, he proposes a constructivist grammar of his own and, at the same time, related to the most disruptive productions of the decade.
Joaquim Tenreiro, of Portuguese origin, was one of the leading furniture designers and visual artists of the mid-20th century in Brazil. He was born into a family of cabinetmakers who emigrated to Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) at the end of 1910. They returned to Portugal in 1914, and he worked with his father as a carpenter. Tenreiro returned to Brazil for good in 1928 and began working for the firm of Laubisch Hirth, among others. In the early 1940s, he was one of the first designers in Brazil to adapt European modernist style and functionalism to the furniture industry. His initial efforts, including in 1942 the light chairs (Poltrona Leve) for the residence of Francisco Inácio Peixoto, achieved considerable success, enabling him in 1943 to found his own firm, Langenbach & Tenreiro. One of his main clients was the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, who asked him for various commissions for his houses. Tenreiro developed his own style, taking advantage of the qualities of the country's wood and local woodworking techniques, both in wood and cane. His 1947 rocking chair (Cadeira de Embalo) is still in production. Tenreiro abandoned the furniture business in the late 1960s to concentrate his artistic activity on painting and sculpture, in which he had already begun to take an interest as a young man, when he attended drawing classes at the Portuguese Literary Lyceum and, later, at the Lyceum of Arts and Crafts in Rio de Janeiro. In 1931, he took part in the so-called Núcleo Bernardelli of Brazilian modernism. In 1970 he was awarded Sculptor of the Year by the Paulista Association of Art Critics.