Miguel Rio Branco: Beauty, The Beast
April 1 – June 20

(MILWAUKEE, WI) The Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University presents Miguel Rio Branco: Beauty, The Beast April 1 – June 20. The exhibition consists of 72 photographs drawn from over thirty years of Branco’s work.

Miguel Rio Branco’s professional career began in 1964 with an exhibition of his painting in Bern, Switzerland. He studied at the New York Institute of Photography in 1966 and in 1968 at the Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial in Rio de Janeiro. In the early 1970s he worked as a photographer and directed experimental films in New York. In 1972, he began exhibiting his work while continuing to direct both shorts and feature movies.

Branco is renown for his use of color and the richness and complexity of his subject matter, contemporary Latin America. Author, poet and art commentator David Levi Strauss notes that "Rio Branco’s colors seep out of their borders like bodily fluids, staining and contaminating everything around them. Bodies, bindings, wounds, and walls are wet with color. Even his mirrors bleed. Rio Branco’s is an art of contamination, contagion, and corrosion, but also of resistance and transcendence."

Miguel Rio Branco was born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain in 1946 and now lives and works in Rio de Janeiro where he photographs contemporary scenes including street fighters, prostitutes, abandoned children and boxers from the Santa Rosa Boxing Academy.

Miguel Rio Branco’s photographs and films are included in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, the SFMoMA, and the Walker Art Center. His photography awards include the 1980 Great Prize of the First Triennale of Photography of the Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo, Brazil, and the 1982 Kodak de la Critique Photographique Award, Paris. His one-person shows include: Center Georges Pompidou, Paris (1982, 1983); Palazzo Fortuny, Venice (1988); and Funarte (Fundacão Nacional de Arte), Rio de Janeiro (1988).

This exhibition was organized by the Aperture Foundation for Photography and the Visual Arts, a not-for-profit organization devoted to photography and the visual arts, and is accompanied by the exhibition catalogue Miguel Rio Branco, with a preface by Lelia and Sebastião Salgado and an essay by David Levi Strauss.

The Haggerty Museum of Art is located at North 13th St. and West Clybourn Avenue on the campus of Marquette University. Museum hours are Monday - Wednesday, Friday - Saturday, 10 am-4:30 p.m.; Thursday, 10 am-8 p.m.; and Sunday, noon-5 p.m.. Free parking is available in the Mary B. Finnigan Parking Lot (enter on 11th St. through Marquette Lot J). For more information on the exhibition or the Haggerty Museum, call 414/288-1669.