Gretta Sarfaty Marchant

Early life

Marchant was born in Athens in 1947 and was named Alegre Sarfaty, from parents of Italian, Greek and Turkish origin. In 1954, her family moved to São Paulo, Brazil. At the age of 17 she married José Grzywacz; she has three children from this marriage: Victoria Sarfaty Grzywacz, Pedro Grzywacz and Rafaela Grzywacz Goodman. She started creating her first artworks when she was 25. She continued her art studies in Brazil, and later lived and worked in Paris, Milan and New York.

Artistic career

Throughout her career Marchant exhibited mainly in São Paulo, New York and London. In the 70s she participated in numerous solo shows in Brazil displaying her early paintings. Her world travels and mixed background has had an important influence on her more contemporary visual work – particularly her photography and collages which deal in themes of identity and culture, although her art is not restricted just to the canvas. Marchant's work embraces a wide range of media including installation, photography, video, paintings and performance.

Brazil and Europe

At the beginning of the 70s she started creating the series of paintings, Metamorphosis and her work was noted by the Brazilian gallerist, Franco Terranova. In 1976 he showed her works in the Galeria de Arte Global, in São Paulo. In 1979 she had several shows in Germany (Karlsruhe) and in Italy (Galleria Diagramma, Milan; Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara) and also in Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, where she performed the Evocative Recollections. In 1983 she created a series of paintings with a book, dedicated to the Brazilian culture, Self-Portrait of Brazil.

Auto-Photos

This series of photos from 1976 is one of the first Marchant's artworks dedicated to female identity and its various demonstrations: her face appears in sequences of beauty and ugliness, grace and madness. A frivolous play with recurrent images of herself is in fact an ironic dialogue with the constructed cultural image of a woman. Marchant expresses in this series the notion of gender performativity, a term created by Judith Butler in 1988.

Roberto Pontual wrote about this work:

The work of Gretta has been originally more related to the language of photography, especially during her recent stay in Europe. Her main focus has always been the female body, including her own body "as a symbol of women's condition in our society.

Transformations

Here the topic of deconstructing the female image gains even more strength. Marchant's face is being manipulated and distorted:

Rather than the manifestation of personal destructive tendencies, these images should be viewed as the externalisation of a revolt directed against the male cultural stereotype, mortifying as it does the feminine form into the authoritarian and distorting dimension of an abstract and aesthetic beauty, to which the artist opposes the angry vision of a reverse side, through a body that is deformed, disfigured and fragmented.

A Women's Diary

Another work from 1976 where Marchant uses photography to create a diary of her own body, captured in almost abstract poses. The way that the body appears on the photos calls into question its materiality.

Evocative Recollections

In 1979 she performed Evocative Recollections (performance with catalogue) in Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, as well as in Pallazzo di Diamanti di Ferrara, Italy. This performance was then showed in different locations in Belgium (Internationaal Cultureel Centrum, Antewerp), Brazil and Italy. Under the same title, Evocative Recollections, Marchant continued the topic of female body and women's liberation in the series of photos (1980–1981). In an essay published for Marchant's solo exhibition at the Centro Culturale La Filanda (Verano Italy) Gillo Dorfles wrote about this series:

Sure: such pictures will not be the same with another artist, with another option, however, even considered under a point of view of photographic document, Gretta's corporeal options reach an unusual efficacy. We are in front of a little common combination, between the creative activity of an artist who knows how to enjoy the expressive dynamic and plastic possibilities of her body and the realisation of a photographic documentation which remains autonomous as well as in its technical as in its aesthetic values.

New York

In 1983 Marchant moved to New York and after a traumatic event, the fire in the Hotel Chelsea, she began a collaboration with American video and performance artists (InterComm group). She also started to discover Kabbalah esoteric thought: she became friends with Simon Jacobson and Kenny Vance and she decided to picture the Kabbalah community in her paintings (Kabbalah, 1984–1985). She also created a performance, Goya Time (1985) and a video, My Single Life in New York (1987).

By the time she was represented by the New York-based gallery, Foster Goldstrom Fine Arts, she was involved in the artistic and cultural life of the city and she got to know Arthur Penn, with whom she collaborated in 1993 on his film The Portrait.

Body Works

In the late 80s and early 90s Marchant created a photographic series of Body Works, where naked bodies

constitute a denunciation of the hedonistic and alienating practices to which the female form is submitted, a denunciation of the repression and mystification to which women's education exposes them from every direction. And they are an affirmation of the real sensuality of women, which respectability nonetheless still attempts to hide or to repress (the curtain or the mosquito net). And so, like gallery owner Romana Loda, we can quote Hugo Von Hofmannsthal when he said: "The profound should be hidden. Where? On the surface".

Gretta & Becheroni: Change and Appropriation of an Autonomous Identity

Video made in 1980 in collaboration with Elvio Becheroni. Marchant perform in a cube made of paper ribbons, making herself a passage through the space. It is a metaphoric way to the new identity.

Goya Time

Inter-disciplinary multimedia event with 100 artists, curated by Marchant, Sandro Dernini and Butch Morris. Marchant wrote a script and directed this art opera inspired by Francisco de Goya's artworks. The performance took place in 1985, in "Quando", church and a car park at the Lower East Side, New York.

Virtual Body Works 1988/2013

During the Spring of 1987 Marchant was invited to participate in an interactive telecommunications event, Who Killed Heinrich Hertz?, created by InterComm (Timothy Binkley, George M. Chaikin, Ira Schneider and Willoughby Sharp). She became involved in collaborative work with each of the above video artist. In 1988 Ira Schneider created a video dedicated to Marchant.

Myth

Video produced by Denny Daniel, in 2003. It is a compilation of snapshots of Marchant, manipulated with a kaleidoscopic effect and juxtaposed with scenes from Marchant's everyday life. The structure of the movie remains the style of music videos from the late 80s.

London

In 1995 she moved to London and married Richard Marchant, "the leading Oriental ceramics dealer". She continued creating photography related to questions of femininity and identity.

Reflections of a Woman

Woman as a central artistic subject appears not only in her auto-portraits but also in the series of paintings dedicated to an issue of female identity and body, Reflections of a Woman (1997). It was exhibited in the Wolseley Fine Arts, London, in 1997.

In this series of paintings Gretta is talking not only about herself, but also about other women. She has found a way to represent women's nature. It is not her body any more, but every woman's body. They can still be self-portraits, but they also are portraits of the women of today, full of confidence about their own identity and conscious of their power.

Recent activity

In 2005 she opened her own gallery, Sartorial Contemporary Art. In October 2008 this moved to a larger space in Kings Cross. Marchant has curated several of its shows including Notting Heaven (2008), Mothers (2008), Remember My Name (2008), Burning Candy (2008), Obsession (2006) and Water (2006). Along with Jasper Joffe and Harry Pye she has been a co-editor of The Rebel magazine.

In 2010 she has exhibited in the show Bad Girls, together with Marina Abramović, Annette Messager, Orlan and Gina Pane. The concept of the exhibition was to compare four generation of female artists since the 70s. In 2011 her works were shown in an exhibition at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo Arte como registro, registro como arte, documenting the history of art performance in Brazil. The show highlights Marchant as one of the few Brazilian artists to ever exhibited at the Centre Georges Pompidou. One year later she participated in Foto/Gráfica – a New History of the Latin-American Photobook (where she exhibited her Autho-Photos), at Le Bal, Paris and Libriste – Dalla collezione di libri d'artista di Marco Carminati: Gretta Sarfaty & Elvio Becheroni . Modificazione e appropriamento di una identita autonoma at the Instituzione Biblioteca Classense in Ravenna, Italy.

Selected solo exhibitions

Selected group exhibitions

Curating art

Marchant curated almost all exhibitions organised in the Sartorial Contemporary Art gallery, which she run for eight years (2005–2013).

Other shows curated by Marchant have included:

In 2009 she was also a judge for the competition, Presenting the Top 100, organised in partnership with PRS for Music and Jealous Gallery, London.