Maxwell Alexandre: Entrega: one planet. one health

Cahiers d’Art proudly presents the exhibition Entrega: one planet. one health from June 9 2023, across its spaces at 14 and 15 rue du Dragon, Paris. This is the artist’s first gallery exhibition in France.

Maxwell’s practice spans across painting, installations, photography, and performances; creating complex and engaging narratives around a Brazil in tension. His works raise several social, cultural, and political issues, revolving around inequality, police violence, community, and spirituality.

The artist, well known for his large-scale works created a new body of work for his exhibition at Cahiers d’Art: oil on canvas paintings in rather intimate formats, introducing his new series Entrega. These will be shown along the artist’s painted doors installed in the space.

Entrega [Delivery], is a spin-off of Maxwell’s Reprovados [Reproached] series (2017) in which he narrates the day-to-day life of people of color, facing concerns over police brutality, the failure of the public education system, and the decimation of local communities.

The artist creates a fictitious gaze on a group of public school students in their uniforms, working as food couriers, prematurely meeting their social fate in a highly complex and unregulated job market. Scenes escalating over multiple paintings portray the students’ foray into a series of events leading to the hunting down, beating and devouring of Dino Danoninho, the popular mascot of Danone; possibly their earliest consumerist desire. The background of this carnage is the idyllic Aterro do Flamengo Park, in Rio, built over an artificial embankment, during Brazil’s modernist era.

The exhibition also presents a new edition: a silkscreen print, published by, and exclusively available through Cahiers d’Art. This work, titled one planet. one health, is the central piece of the exhibition and the series Entrega encompassing and summarizing its subject matter.

Maxwell Alexandre (Rio de Janeiro, 1990) was born and raised in the Rocinha favela, in an evangelical home. The artist served in the army and was a professional street inline skater for 12 years. He graduated in design from PUC-RJ (Pontifícia Universidade Católica of Rio de Janeiro) in 2016. In 2018, he received the São Sebastião Culture Prize from the Archdiocese of Rio de Janeiro. Maxwell won the PIPA Prize in 2020 and was elected one of the 35 artists worldwide included on Artsy’s Vanguard list that same year. In 2021 he was elected Artist of the Year by Deutsche Bank.

The artist recently inaugurated the Maxwell Alexandre Pavilion, a touring exhibition space created to curate and exhibit his own projects and interests in real-time, hosted for the first time in the neighborhood of São Cristóvão, in Rio de Janeiro.

His work is in the collections of various prestigious institutions, including the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, the Museu de Arte do Rio, the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, Perez Art Museum Miami, and Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.

Cahiers d’Art will publish a monograph on Maxwell Alexandre including his latest works of the Entrega series. The book, a 120-page hardcover with texts in English and Portuguese, will be available in the fall of 2023.