Revelos [Reliefs]

Liuba Wolf’s abstract sculptures embodied the salient characteristics of the postwar period. Living both in Paris, where she studied art, and in São Paulo, where her family settled, Wolf developed her artistic practice in a cultured, international environment. Her artworks seem to exist between abstraction and figuration. The artist affirmed of her pieces, “For me, they are animals. But I cannot explain where they come from—it must be from my subconscious.” Wolf found inspiration in nature, but also in the ancient cultures of the past. These reliefs seem to oscillate between an abstract vocabulary of ancient archetypal forms and a hybrid bestiary of natural shapes. Wolf organized her panels as pages of an artist’s book, in which she also included a poem by Brazilian poet and art historian Lélia Coelho Frota (1938-2010).