Marcel Giro

Marcel Giró - SEM Title © Marcel Giró-Palmira Puig Estate / Toni Ricart Giró

Técnica: Silver jelly on paper

Biografía del Artista: Marcel Giró's work is part of the Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante (FCCB) photography collective, a benchmark of avant-garde photography in Brazil, characterized by the constant search for new visual languages ​​and the creative fervour of post-war Brazil. Rocio Santa Cruz works actively with the photographer's family background. Marcel Giró arrived in São Paulo in 1948 and joined the FCCB after a long career as an amateur photographer. His first photographs date back to the 1930s and take the landscapes of the Catalan Pyrenees as their main setting. They mainly portray details of mountains and lakes, already displaying a particular sensitivity towards abstraction, a style that would mark his work. In 1953, Marcel opened the photography studio Estúdio Giró, together with his wife Palmira Puig, also a photographer at the FCCB. Giró then established himself as a professional photographer and began a productive career as a pioneer of advertising photography. Giró's work is articulated from a precise and innovative perspective. His photographs show a recurrent interest in geometric figures, chiaroscuro and extreme contrasts. With these elements, Giró creates his own aesthetic, a new photographic syntax, where the artist constantly tries, through his eloquent play of light and shadow, to exceed the limits of representation and meaning. His work has been included in important international collections, such as the MoMa (New York) –which will be on display in the exhibition Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946-1964 from March to June 2021–, Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), Itaú Cultural (São Paulo) and the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC, Barcelona), among others.