No todo trayecto es recto

Travesía Cuatro presents No todo trayecto es recto [“Not every path is straight”], Guga Szabzon’s first solo exhibition in Mexico, in the Casa Franco by Luis Barragán (1929), the gallery’s space in Guadalajara. Guga’s hand traces maps of palpable impressions, dreams and recollections. Her practice is driven by the desire to map the course of different actions that constitute lived experience: from the sensation of an atmospheric phenomenon to imagined landscapes. Szabzon’s poetics arise from dealing with the boundaries between writing, sewing and drawing. In her work we encounter accounts of poetic writing, drawings, collages and the documentation of everyday events. 

The sewing machine turns the tremor into a physical state. The speed and automatism of the machine merge in a gesture that is as contingent as it is reflexive, which can be understood as an embodied practice. The forms, the words and the actions, vibrate. Like maps, that allow uncertainty around experience to linger beyond semantics, unstitching the illusory unambiguity that fascinates us in definitions and in delimitations. Yet, while the movements of the lines frustrate our hopes of conventional and prosaic order, the apparent disorder found in its place does not imply anarchy but a shifting between supposedly contradictory forms of order: from tension to extension, form to formless, from necessity to freedom. 

“You continue ahead. Fall into a hole. Get up. A fork. You choose the left, go back and that path no longer exists”, writes the artist in her notebooks. It is within this cosmos-chaos that the game is established between sense and nonsense. Thus, it is through alterations between oneiric and reflexive states that her works leave open the possibility of wandering between various orders. In this sense, Guga Szabzon’s work is expressed as much in the movement of the lines and dashes, as in what lies between them.

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Guga Szabzon (1987, São Paulo, SP, Brazil), lives and works in São Paulo.

She graduated in Visual Arts from Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado  FAAP, in 2009, and from Faculdade Paulista de Artes  FPA, in 2010. In the same year she was selected for the artistic residency program Brasil goes Berlin, funded by the German government. In 2009, she was part of Projeto Tripé at Sesc Pompeia and, in 2012, Szabzon participated in the exhibition program at Centro Cultural São Paulo  CCSP. In 2014, she was part of the artist residency programme organized by artist Elisa Bracher at Instituto Acaia in São Paulo and in 2016, she participated in the artist residency programme of A Ilha in Lisbon. In 2018, Szabzon integrated the group show A Vastidão dos mapas, curated by Agnaldo Farias, at Palacete das Artes, in Salvador and the group show Hóspede, at Fundação Eva Klabin. That same year she was one of the artists who performed activation of works of the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo. In 2019, her work became part of the permanent collection of the Museu de Arte do Rio – MAR.

Among her solo shows are Tremor, at Millan, Sao Paulo, curated by Cristiano Raimondi, in 2023; dia e noite, ainda é longe?, at Galeria Superfície, São Paulo, curated by Diego Matos in 2021; O Começo de uma coisa maior e de um dilema, curated by Galciani Neves, Galeria Superfície, São Paulo and Tudo que criamos passa a existir, Sesc Ipiranga, SP, both in 2019; In 2017, Como é que eu sabia?, Galeria Superfície, Sao Paulo; Atlas/Salta, at the same place and Um nó deve ter duas importantes qualidades, poder ser desatado facilmente, e ao mesmo tempo não se desfazer sozinho, at Casa Samambaia, in São Paulo, 2015, and Raspadinha, curated by Thais Rivitti, at Galeria Transversal, in 2012.