Palmira Puig

Palmira Puig - Estudo © Marcel Giró-Palmira Puig Estate / Toni Ricart Giró

Technique: Printing with 12 pigmented inks on Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper (100% cotton) of 308 gr.

Artist Biography: Since RocioSantaCruz presented her for the first time in Europe at Paris Photo 2018, Palmira Puig-Giró's work has been integrated into important international collections. MoMA (Museum of Modern Art, New York) will include her photographs in the exhibition Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946-1964 in March 2021. A signature rediscovered For decades, Palmira Puig-Giró was known as the muse of her husband, photographer Marcel Giró. It was not until 2018 that Rocío Santa Cruz, when delving into Giró's family collection with Toni Ricart, Marcel's nephew, discovered two photographic languages, two different authorships, although linked, that coexisted in the photographer's archives. By retracing the trail of this unknown signature, they came to the following conclusion: not only was Palmira the author of an important work of her own, but Marcel's own authorship then acquired a new meaning. The story of the artist and his muse became obsolete and gave way to a more complex, more horizontal, richer narrative. Both artists shared camera, film, scenarios; each with his own gaze. The faces of the avant-garde Palmira Puig-Giró was, along with Gertrudes Altschul, Menha S. Polacow, Barbara Mors and Dulce G. Carneiro, one of the few women who were part of the Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante, a collective of avant-garde photographers located in São Paulo. Her work articulates an experimental corpus of portraits and landscapes, where metaphor and social criticism are framed in the same capture. Puig-Giró's photography is nourished by avant-gardism and black and white contrasts, but his signature is more humanistic than that of his fellow São Paulo artists. While they tended to sublimate the abstract, the pure moment of visual interruption, Puig-Giró goes beyond the instant and the object. The photographer broadens her vision to show the surroundings of her photographs, the faces, stories and memories of the places she travels through with her camera, and takes everyday life and gesture to an aesthetic plane as meticulous as it is poetic.