Galatea

Galatea and Simões de Assis will jointly present the work of Brazilian multidisciplinary artist Heitor dos Prazeres.

About the Gallery
Galatea is a gallery that emerges from the different and complementary trajectories and backgrounds of its founding partners: Antonia Bergamin worked for almost a decade as a managing partner of a major gallery in São Paulo; Conrado Mesquita is an art dealer and collector whose specialty is discovering great works in unlikely places; and Tomás Toledo is a curator who actively contributed to the historic institutional renovation of MASP, from which he recently left as chief curator.

With modern and contemporary Brazilian art as its main focus, Galatea works with and sells both well-known names from the national art scene and new talents in contemporary art, while also revisiting historical artists. Such temporal amplitude reflects and articulates the conceptual basis of the gallery’s program: to be a point of support and convergence between different cultures, temporalities, styles, and genres, provoking powerful frictions between the old and the new, the canonical and the non-canonical, the erudite and the informal.

About the Presentation
Galatea and Simões de Assis will jointly present the work of Brazilian multidisciplinary artist Heitor dos Prazeres. Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1898, he began his activities as a self-taught painter in 1937. Personal memories, scenes of everyday life among the Afro-diasporic community, and carnival festivities were the main themes of his production. Many of his paintings depict the movements of arms and legs, or flowing skirts, bringing rhythm to two-dimensional figures. Music was present in the artist’s life from an early age, and he also played a pioneering role in samba as a musician, singer, composer, and founder of two of Rio’s first samba schools. In 2023, the Centro Cultural do Brasil do Rio de Janeiro held the largest Heitor dos Prazeres retrospective to date, featuring more than 200 works across visual art, music, and fashion.