Heberth Sobral
Born in Minas Gerais in 1984, Heberth Sobral has always been interested in plastic arts and today he has become an artist who puts controversial themes of daily life under discussion. He strarted his artistic career when he took a photography course that led him to be invited by Vik Muniz to work as his assistant.
Heberth develops his own projects in which he uses the support of tiles, paintings, drawings, banknotes, and dolls to build his own language, always focused on the representation of everyday memories. He addresses themes of behaviour, thoughts and actions carried out through culture. Always doing something present in everyone’s life, the artist’s idea is to take the viewer into his work through memory.
Stocks is a long term project which will include ten I.P.Os..
Each I.P.O is a series of 100 small paintings with colors and geometric shapes. Its original name follows the principle of an action, both in interfering in the order of the paintings and in the stock market shares.
Each square represents a fraction of the work, just like in the stock market: when most of it is acquired, the higher the percentage of the work. The orders of the 100 works are random according to the particular taste of those who own them.
The Art market is very similar to the financial market and it is not by chance that large banking corporations have their private collections of art, these activities go together.
Some collectors acquired an artist thinking about its valorization thus increasing its patrimonial value.
As in the stock market, they bet on low stocks to win high or keep the stock to increase their participation in the company. The company that goes public on the stock exchange uses the capital of its shareholders to make investments in its products, the same logic serves for the artist to use the capital of a work sold to reinvest in his works.
For the construction of the visual language of the work, he uses parts of the Playmobil doll. It was based on the Bauhaus philosophy of seeking simpler shapes and lines, defined by the function of the object Along with that he sought references of geometric balance in Russian Constructivism, colors of African paintings and the symbolism of Rubem Valentim.
In the series Windows of the interior, Sobral works with windows that come from Muriaé, Minas Gerais, where he was born.
One of the desires of people who live in the countryside is to have a truck to discover Brazil and to see in person what they could only watch on TV.
They stared at the trucks coming and going on the road through the windows in their childhoods, wishing they could go with them to other destinations.
Time passed and what made him get to know other places in Brazil and abroad was art. The window frame represents the time of his childhood and the desire to go away. The painting is a kind of window that takes you to a landscape, a trip, and it opens a gap where there is only a wall.
Tiles is a work inspired by the fusion between his work with Playmobil and the Portuguese culture of tiles.
During an artistic residency in the ART District of Cascais in Portugal, he discovered the sophisticated art of using tiles to frame and give an identity to their architecture.