Pivô presents new works by Paulo Monteiro and Gokula Stoffel at Copan and SP-Arte

In the year it celebrates its 15th anniversary, Pivô opens, on April 1st, the first exhibition of 2026 at Copan, the Projeto Vitrine, featuring new works by Paulo Monteiro and Gokula Stoffel. In its third edition, the program takes as its starting point the encounter between artists who share a common history—whether of friendship, affection, or prior collaboration—proposing that this proximity becomes the very engine of creation, a space where the participants’ pre-existing complicity unfolds into works that could only emerge from this relationship. The exhibition features a curatorial text by Julia de Souza and remains on view at Pivô Copan until April 21, also integrating SP-Arte 2026 from April 8 to 12.

“In this edition of the Projeto Vitrine, which has previously featured the duos Sônia Gomes and Juliana Santos (2021) and Erika Verzutti and Anderson Borba (2023), we proposed a collaboration between two artists who share a life, launching the challenge of an encounter between distinct practices, in which intimacy becomes material. The fact that both have been part of Pivô at different moments also makes this edition a celebration of the institution’s fifteen years. Monteiro, a central figure of the generation that emerged in the 1980s with the Casa 7 group, operates in a continuous tension between painting and sculpture, using negative space as a medium so that his paintings behave like objects and his objects like pictorial fields. Stoffel departs from a porous attention to the surroundings, in a practice shaped by chance and the intrinsic properties of matter, moving freely between painting, sculpture, and weaving,” says Fernanda Brenner, artistic director of Pivô.

The approximately thirty new paintings reflect the singularity of the encounter between Monteiro and Stoffel: the duo set out to experiment with elements of their languages, methods, and visual repertoires. The enjoyable process, in Monteiro’s words, carries a sense of newfound freedom. “There is a desire to lose a bit of one’s identity. Of course, we never fully achieve it because everything you do carries your mark, your way of doing things, but it is somewhat liberating to work like this,” says Paulo. “It becomes very easy to recognize what is missing, what can be added. Of course, not everything comes instantly, all at once, but there is a much greater ease compared to our own work, where we tend to over-elaborate and every decision carries more weight,” adds Gokula.

Looking back at this free process, the duo identifies a “shared unconscious,” resulting in a body of work that emerges from this field of exchange and mutual contamination: a deep dive into making that tensions and blurs the boundaries of identity, creating zones of intersection where gestures, materials, and compositional decisions begin to operate collectively.

The creative process also gave rise to a video documentation presented alongside the works, in which the two artists share reflections, techniques, and creative processes.

Visit pivo.org.br/projeto-vitrine/ and check the full list of works.