Four separate but simultaneous exhibitions, in four different Norwich locations, bring major sculptural work from Brazilian-born artist, Ana Maria Pacheco, to Norwich for the first time.

Curated for Norfolk Contemporary Art Society, in association with Pratt Contemporary and in partnership with Norwich University of the Arts, Norwich Cathedral, Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery and The Cathedral of St John the Baptist, Norwich, these four major exhibitions will explore the sculpture of Ana Maria Pacheco produced over the last four decades. Supported by Arts Council England.

Although she has strong local connections to Norwich, the sculptor, Ana Maria Pacheco, was born in Brazil. Following degrees in both Art and Music, she taught and lectured for several years at Universities in Goiás before coming to London in 1973 on a British Council Scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art. Since 1973 she has lived and worked in England. From 1985-9 she was Head of Fine Art at Norwich School of Art (now NUA), the first woman to hold such a post in the UK. In 1999 she received the prestigious Ordem do Rio Branco from the Brazilian Government. She received an Honorary Degree from the University of East Anglia and in 2003 was made a Fellow of University College London. From 1997 to 2000 she was Associate Artist at the National Gallery, London (the first sculptor to hold the post), a residency that culminated in a major exhibition of her work that toured on to further venues in the UK. She currently lives and works in London and Kent.

The variety of Pacheco’s sculptural work is remarkable and with its tough humanist core, her project constantly provokes us to seriously question the true extent of our own humanity, and of our uses and abuses of power. Her work shows us how vulnerable we are. Large and enduring themes; violence, journeys, death, love, transformation and metamorphosis reflect her high seriousness, but at the same time her work is neither pompous nor devoid of humour. With a cast of characters that are betrayed, tortured, ecstatic, seductive, grotesque, bestial or divine, her work can arouse extreme emotions, a process that some concluded art no longer has the power to elicit.

The four venues showing her work have all got important associations for the artist. The two Norwich cathedrals reflect her upbringing in a Brazilian household with a catholic father and a protestant mother. The old Norwich School of Art, now NUA, was where she arrived to become Head of Fine Art, and the Castle was where she had a major exhibition that included Man and His Sheep and where she encountered Francis Cheetham and his alabaster reliefs. What follows are some notes on the work that can be seen in each of the four exhibition venues, highlighting the Norwich connections and the complex inter-relationships between the works.

At The Gallery, at Norwich University of the Arts

The Banquet (1985) is a large polychromed wood sculpture, completed the same year the artist moved to Norwich, when she was appointed by Bill English to succeed Ed Middleditch as Head of Fine Art at what was Norwich School of Art, now NUA. Pacheco was also awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University in 2002 for her services to Fine Art and the University is very pleased to welcome her back to Norwich, especially as they celebrate their 170th anniversary this year. The Banquet has not previously been exhibited here in the City and it will be shown in The Gallery at NUA together with a related contextual work: Box of Heads (1983) – a loan from Towner, Eastbourne. The other half of the gallery will be dedicated to more recent large-scale graphic works including Dark Event I-VII (2007)—making a connection to the sculpture in the Cathedral— An Ancient Dark Night Descended Upon My Soul I & II Drypoint, 2010-12 and Burial, 2014. Smaller works will include a new portfolio of ten drypoints, The Miraculous Journey of a Little Vixen (2014), with an accompanying text by Marius Kociejowski.

The enormous seated black figures in The Banquet, taller than the standing viewers, compel them to join in, complicitly completing the circle around the defenceless offering lying on the table. With their sharp teeth and without necks, these are dark, formidable and threatening figures. And yet there is still a playfulness, a dry sense of humour about the work that reflects on the contradictions the artist feels about her migration, and her complex cultural inheritance.

Pacheco left Brazil in 1973, some time after the military regime had taken power in 1964, and many years before democracy was restored in the late 80s. The totalitarian repression affected artists, journalists and other civilian occupations. Vivian Schelling has written about the background to The Banquet:

“ In The Banquet the figures have been equipped with a set of real teeth which are sharp and jut out from under the lips in a bestial manner. This virtual coming to life of the figure blurs the boundary between art and life and renders the vision of human relationships as a mutual devouring particularly disturbing. Cannibalism as a metaphor for human relationships is a central theme in Brazilian cultural history. It was originally developed in the ‘Cannibalist Manifesto’ in the 1920s by the Modernist poet Oswald de Andrade. Using the image of the ‘cannibalist’ Indian as a metaphor for the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised, it proposed that Brazil overcame its perennial cultural dependence on Europe by ‘devouring’ what Europe had to offer but in the process adapting to its local conditions.”

Ana Maria Pacheco Sculpture: Norwich 2015 will be at The Gallery at NUA from 17 March to 25 April 2015. For more information visit: http://www.nua.ac.uk/

At Norwich Cathedral

Shadows of the Wanderer is a large polychromed wood sculpture on a wooden base or plinth and it will be installed in the Cathedral’s North Transept. It comprises ten over life-size figures, each carved from a single lime tree, that crowd close together and stand as looming shadows behind a young man carrying an older man on his back. The group recalls the tale of Aeneas, who carries his father Anchises from the ruins of burning Troy, but it also powerfully resonates with contemporary issues, particularly those of exile, asylum, migration and the displacement of people. First shown at the Aldeburgh Festival, it was later shown at St John’s Church, Waterloo as part of their Faith, Justice, City project in 2010, and Neil McGregor, Director of the British Museum, had this to say about the work in a sermon at the church:

“The young man at the front of the sculpture group, fleeing from something we cannot see, carries nothing but his father - his past, his identity - and it was I think a stroke of genius that Ana Maria has carved both father and son out of the same piece of wood. This man literally cannot leave his past behind, but must take it with him. And that young man is about to step off the plinth and be among us. How are we going to react? Now, today, as this displaced man and his family arrive in our church? What will we do? Will we behave with justice and with love?”

The work will remain in the Cathedral for six months. For more information visit: www.cathedral.org.uk

In Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery

Enchanted Garden, a new series of eight polychromed and gilded alabaster reliefs, reflects the artist’s long interest in the famous medieval alabasters in the V&A and in the Castle’s collection and her friendship with the late Francis Cheetham, Head of the Museum, who wrote the definitive book, English Medieval Alabasters. This will be the first public showing of these recently completed works and they can be seen on the balcony of the Norman Keep alongside some of the Castle’s own alabasters.

As the artist has remarked, reliefs are peculiar objects,. Unlike in a conventional sculpture she had to worry about a background and deal with an implicit frame. She is using very traditional techniques; gilding and gypsum based tempera paints, applied as thin glazes, decorate the surface of the alabaster, a soft, delicate and amorphous material. The subject for the whole Enchanted Garden series is the artist’s homage to the power of the human imagination. The unicorn figure recalls Rilke’s famous idea in Sonnets to Orpheus, that it was the vivid imagining alone of the unicorn that finally made it appear; it is not real but it exists! Pacheco grew up in a landscape in Goiás that was wild and magical too, and this rich landscape of mythical creatures appears in other works such as her Sheba and Solomon series of prints and paintings.

Ana Maria Pacheco Sculpture: Norwich 2015 will be at Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery from 17 March to 31 August 2015. For more information visit: http://www.museums.norfolk.gov.uk/

In the Cathedral of St John the Baptist

A large head in Portland stone, Study for Requiem (John the Baptist I), 1989, will be exhibited in the North Aisle of the Nave. John the Baptist is one of the most popular subjects for paintings over hundreds of years and is also the subject of numerous baroque sculptures, often stripping the subject down to his head alone. In a Cathedral whose patron is such a familiar figure in Christian iconography, it is often easy to forget that the abuse of power wielded by Herod that led to the beheading of John the Baptist is not just a familiar biblical story that prefigured Christ’s death but has contemporary relevance. The recent appalling use of ritual beheadings by Islamic State reminds us that death squads, regicide and French revolutionaries are nothing new and that abuses of power are a constant presence in our dangerous world. The calm, almost serene portrayal in this stone version of the martyr’s head reasserts an underlying humanity and reverence for life, while in contrast, another version, Study of Head (John the Baptist III), will be placed for a period, excluding Easter, on top of the font. More grizzly, yet more domestic in scale, this version has the severed head on a primitive wooden platter, with its blow-torched, charred and chain-sawn hair. Its inspiration lies in the artist’s experience of Brazilian baroque and Amerindian sculptures. Small and large nails add an echo of the crucifixion to the hair. This is a revolutionary John, who spoke truth to Herod whose power then corrupted him.

Ana Maria Pacheco Sculpture: Norwich 2015 will be at The Cathedral of St John the Baptist, Norwich from 17 March to 6 September 2015. For more information visit: www.sjbcathedral.org.uk