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FIRMAMENTO SELECTED PAINTINGS

 

Primarily elaborated in painting, video and the Firmamento Moving Stills, Firmamento ties together several key themes that recur throughout her artworks, such as contemporary anthropology, unnoticed interrelationships and concealed realities, the influence on culture and society of media and technology, defining the multidisciplinary nature of her practice. Firmamento is an ongoing project, which Debora Hirsch describes as a culmination of her previous work’s conceptual underpinnings via intricate configurations of her amassed archive. 

Themes related to power and control are persistent in Debora Hirsch’s most expansive series to date, Firmamento. The chosen title refers to a biblical conception of the Earth’s makeup: in the Old Testament, it was believed that when God created the Earth, He created a solid dome (the “firmament”) which made up the sky and held the entirety of the visible cosmos. Hirsch’s title is not necessarily religious. Rather, her poetic cosmological reference aims to uncover questions and ideas surrounding human perception, exploring the way the structures of power can be subtle, insidious and imperceptible, as well as brutal and invasive, ranging from historic colonizing dynamics and its legacy as well as technological control to dynamics acting at a personal level.

In trying to restore the complexity of the real, [the] Firmamento artworks exploit multiple references resulting in images that find their meaning at the end of an engineered construction, unfolding in a selection of decontextualized evocative architectural details, decoded artifacts related to the digital language, the apparent ‘natural condition' of symbolic decorative elements, scientific representations, nature, traces from handmade automatic patterns unwillingly quoting the microscopic life, historic colonialist imagery of the Americas. It is, in a sense, a meditation on the complex (and unequal) harmony of human life across varying temporalities, simultaneously replete with beauty and ugliness. 

Debora Hirsch- Firmamento at Hutchinson Modern & Contemporary, New York  2021.webp

Firmamento Hutchinson Modern & Contemporary, New York,  2021

Debora Hirsch- Firmamento at Hutchinson Modern & Contemporary, New York  2021 2.webp

Firmamento at Hutchinson Modern & Contemporary, New York  2021

Debora Hirsch- Firmamento at Hutchinson Modern & Contemporary, New York  2021 4.webp

Firmamento at Hutchinson Modern & Contemporary, New York  2021

Debora Hirsch- Firmamento at Hutchinson Modern & Contemporary, New York  2021 3.webp

Firmamento at Hutchinson Modern & Contemporary, New York  2021

Até aqui, Installation view, Boccanera Gallery, Trento

Até aqui, Installation view, Boccanera Gallery, Milano

b8. Debora Hirsch_Firmamento (tree), 2019, acrylic and ink on canvas, 110cm x 185cm.jpg

Firmamento (tree), 2019, acrylic and ink on canvas, 110cm x 185cm

Firmamento (calabash 2), 2021, acrylics and oil on canvas, 88cm x 88cm

Firmamento (wood), 2021, acrylics and oil pencil on canvas, 88cm x 88cm

Firmamento (hall of antiques), 2019, acrylic and ink on canvas, 86cm x 130cm

Firmamento (mandioca), 2020, acrylics and oil on canvas, 34” x 34”

Firmamento (Calabash), 2020, acrylics and oil on canvas, 34” x 34”.

Firmamento (templar castle), 2021, acrylics and oil on canvas, 125cm x 183cm

Firmamento (pelourinho), 2021, acrylics and oil pencil on canvas, 186cm x 110cm

Firmamento (Eckhout), 2020, acrylic and ink on canvas, 90cm x 90cm

Firmamento (man over nature), 2021, acrylics and oil on canvas, 88cm x 88cm

Firmamento (nucleus), 2019, acrylic and ink on canvas, 86cm x 130cm

Firmamento (natural history), 2019-2021, acrylics and oil on canvas, 86cm x 130cm

FIRMAMENTO VIDEO STILLS

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Firmamento 2019. Digital video and animation. Duration 6'

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Firmamento 2019. Digital video and animation. Duration 6'

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Firmamento 2019. Digital video and animation. Duration 6'

BLAST_Debora Hirsch_Firmamento 3.jpg

Firmamento 2019. Digital video and animation. Duration 6'

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Firmamento 2019. Digital video and animation. Duration 6'

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Binary Fresco 2020. Digital video and animation. Duration 3' 49"

DONOTCLICKTHRU ARTWORKS

 

Hirsch’s artwork is often conceptual and appropriative as she gathers visuals (images and texts) from a wide variety of media to build her own perspective through drawings, paintings, videos and other forms. Her work for this exhibition does not suggest an emotional or political agenda. Rather, Hirsch’s work deals with the influence on culture and society of contemporary means of communication and technology. “If everything is out there, what is left within you?” asks one of her drawings. Hirsch explores our human condition, including vulnerabilities and contradictions, without leaving any space for a judgmental attitude, axioms and clichés.

The imperative sentence donotclickthru is also the url of the website related to the work: www.donotclickthru.com. ‘The aim of the website is to get zero clicks.’ It presents a succession of images, drawings and texts, which simulate the typical web format of communication. It may work like a trap for humans in which we, reduced to mice, go for an invisible, immaterial and odourless piece of cheese. We are presented to the Internet ephemera - a trap that may transform a possibility into a must, a doubt into a certainty and a minority into a majority of people, or everybody. Anything can be turned into a list, no matter whether meaningless or fictitious. Our curiosity gets triggered; we must fill that knowledge gap. Clicking is the perfect type of pleasure. Clicking is exquisite and it leaves one unsatisfied. The more you find the content disappointing, the more you will come across it again. What goes around, comes around.’

In the paintings on show, Hirsch acts as the narrator of some precise historical moments. Such moments regard the Brazil’s colonial period, the pre-digital era in which viral pervasiveness could be only analogical, the current digital society, and the time still to come. “We may think about the digital world as a sophisticated reflection device, a relentless mirror. Mirrors are destabilising but we are fascinated by them as our reality attracts and terrifies us. The Narcissus myth, recreated by Borges, reminds us that one cannot stand that tension for long. We have never had so many reflective surfaces and information.”

In the exhibition, Hirsch reflects about the democratic, horizontal, non-hierarchical, interactive, symmetrical, empowered way to communicate that technology has given us. However, paradoxical- ly the new technology has also given us a “life that is destined to be so predictable and controlled, condemned to overexposure and lack of privacy, a freaking orderly society.” 

Her work seems familiar but whether its meaning refers to digital culture, popular beliefs, religion, oppression, nature, burden, or something else altogether, one cannot say. These artworks engage us in and engender conversation. They do not censor or support their subjects leaving any such judgments to the onlookers. 

Donotclickthru (tree), oil on canvas, 2016, 102 x 140 cm

Donotclickthru, installation view at Pack Gallery, 2016

Donotclickthru (colonial tiles), 2016, oil on canvas, 96 x 168 cm

Donotclickthru (Santo Expedito), 2016, oil on canvas, 102 x 140 cm

Donotclickthru, installation view at Pack Gallery, 2016

Donotclickthru, installation view at Pack Gallery, 2016

Donotclickthru (Warhol), oil on canvas, 57 x 70 cm

Donotclickthru (insomnia), oil on canvas, 57 x 70 cm

Donotclickthru (anxiety), oil on canvas, 57 x 70 cm

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