Miguel Bakun

A collection and the work of Miguel Bakun

The understanding and the habitat of the oeuvre of Miguel Bakun (1909-1963) are the objectives of this exhibition, which originates from a corresponding book publication, organised from the private collection of Walter Gonçalves and the dedication of Eliane Prolik.

In his painting and drawing, Bakun expresses the peculiarities of a curious and gentle perception of the world in relation to nature, while at the same time demonstrating a creative potency through the impetuous and ritmous brushstrokes or graphisms that are present in the fature of his works. A strong and expressive subject who captures the world in his art with so much listening and openness, capable of constructing an oeuvre of poetic power and very rich visual thinking.

His recent recognition, in Brazil and internationally, is the result of our new researches, critical readings, publications, exhibitions and the presence of Bakun's work in art fairs and public art collections. After his emergence in a wider cultural sphere, and especially in Brazilian modernism, it seems to us necessary to revisit his work, here in Curitiba, the place where he produced it, mostly in the 1940s and 1950s. We need to know more about him, his place in our context and about ourselves. We have a text by Adolfo Montejo Navas on Bakun's paintings and, for the first time, the artist's graphic work receives a specific critical approach by Ronaldo Brito.

This exhibition presents 25 paintings and 24 drawings by Bakun, together with 5 paintings from the collection of the Museum Oscar Niemeyer. It is important for private collections to be shown to the public and to participate in making art more visible and meaningful.

Eliane Prolik - Curator
Walter Gonçalves - Collector

Miguel Bakun saw the world in a unique way. A native of Paraná of Slavic descent, he lived in the Curitiba of the last century. Considered one of the most significant artists due to his national and international presence, he was nicknamed the Brazilian Van Gogh not only because of the similarity of his lines and colors, but also due to the personal characteristics he shared, such as shyness and introspection.

Bakun's works, which are part of the Oscar Niemeyer Museum's collection, are of incalculable artistic and historical value. In this exhibition, part of them can be seen in an interesting dialog with dozens of drawings and paintings by him, many unpublished to the general public, which belong to Walter Gonçalves' private collection.

An exhibition that gives even more visibility to the impeccable production of one of the most original representatives of modern Brazilian art. For 30 years, Bakun recorded the simple in a sophisticated manner. He turned scenes of the sea, vegetation, flowers or simple everyday places, such as backyards, into magnificent images. With magnificent strokes, he also produced several portraits. 

As well as being shown in this solo exhibition, this set has also been transformed into a book about the artist, with texts on his pictorial and graphic production by Adolfo Montejo Navas and Ronaldo Brito. 

Misunderstood in his time, Bakun is increasingly acclaimed by critics and spectators alike. He is an artist who evokes a deep sense of pride and belonging in us, the people of Paraná.

Juliana Vellozo Almeida Vosnika
CEO of the Oscar Niemeyer Museum

Bakun was not just a self-taught, isolated or semi-savage artist, but a self who sought the truth of nature (the truth in nature).

It's a conception and a modus operandi that brings to mind another imaginary, not only visual but also cognitive, because the nature-landscape and the iconographic references it handles (backyards, fences, ponds, shores) are not at all delimited or secure as such, they metamorphose. It could be said that Bakun provides a blind spot that disrupts the traditional observation of things, and which can be better observed in the 21st century, when even facts fight with the imagination for control of the status of the real.

What fate would be assigned to the reading of Bakun's work, when the orbit of his ouevre is guided so much by pictorial emotion, feeding the vision? Besides, the degree of inner life or inner power in his divided nature even seems to evoke a “supernaturality” as a vital feeling, also aesthetic.

In them there is a shapeless matter of pictorial masses, like paintings in combustion, throbbing, pulsating the images they offer, because, deep down, there is a certain telluric magma, palpitating, brought to the surface. Paintings that are always vibrant, not stationary, exciting.

A pictorial microphysics in which the traces are evident, numerous, solitary traces standing out from the general tonal whole, harmonized in its evident weave, but participating in a harsh, abrupt, rough devotion.

Miguel Bakun seems to have reached his maturity as an artist with a painting that is still being made before our eyes, that hasn't been completely finished. To this day, it presents an instability, an oblique, more tangential gaze.

Adolfo Montejo Navas

Miguel Bakun's voracious paint impregnates the canvas and turns it into a vehicle for the artist's expressive Self. In turn, the agitated strokes of his graphite and charcoal, irradiating through the paper, mobilize the scenes and transform them into authentic existential flagrants. Unpretentious, casual, it is precisely their dispersed and elusive character that ensures their aesthetic consistency. The sketches may even begin as preparatory studies for a future oil painting, but they soon emancipate themselves as autonomous events. And if, as studies, they reveal a certain mastery of the academic foreshortening (churches and ships prove it), it's clear that, for Bakun, the world is above all an uncertain and palpitating place: hence the almost random scribbles, kinds of commas and semicircles, more or less arabesques, I would say, that cross the scene like a gale. And nothing escapes it, there is no neutral space for this artist who lives his being-in-the-world as an incessant perceptual struggle.

But he treats his territory in a free and anti-academic way, not at all mimetic, in constant mutation, faithful to his instinctive and uncultivated expressionism. It is a modest nature, averse to the grandiose, that attracts his exacerbated sensitivity. And even then, he goes to look for it behind its back, in anonymous parts of the world, which he chooses as totems of his passage through life. 

More than a decade ago, I think, Miguel Bakun's work stopped being a local phenomenon in Paraná and became an intrinsic part of Brazil's rarefied visual modernism. It took its place among his peers, mainly Pancetti and Guignard, painters who, in an indifferent, if not hostile, environment, were opening the way for a modern post-impressionist visibility in Brazil.

Ronaldo Brito