Gretta Sarfaty (born Alegre Sarfaty; also known as Gretta Grzywacz and Greta Sarfaty Marchant or mononymously as Gretta) is a painter, photographer, and multimedia artist who earned international acclaim in the 1970s for her artistic works related to body art and feminism. Born in 1947 in Greece, she moved with her family to São Paulo in 1954, being naturalised as Brazilian.MELO, Tálisson. "Retransformações de Gretta Sarfaty". Texto curatorial, Auroras, 2022. https://auroras.art.br/exhibitions/gretta-sarfaty/
Alongside her art, she was the founder of the artist-run space Sartorial Contemporary Art (2005–2010), and since 2010 she keeps an art collection called Alegre Sarfaty Collection.
From the 1970s, Gretta developed her artistic career. She took fine arts classes in São Paulo, at FAAP and the Escola Pan Americana de Artes - she was taught by artists working also in São Paulo, including Walter Lewy, Ivald Granato, Mário Gruber, and Savério Castellano. She studied photography with the photographer Julio Abe Wakahara during 1975. Due to her artistic work and exhibitions, she moved to Paris, Milan and New York.
Gretta exhibited her work at institutions such as Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC/USP), Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM/SP), Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), Museu Nacional de Belas Artes (MNBA), Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Moreira Salles Institute, (MAP), Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Museo MACRO Asilo, Palazzo dei Diamanti di Ferrara, Foundation Calouste Gulbenkian, Fundação Vera Chaves Barcellos (FVCB), Centre Georges Pompidou, Internationaal Cultureel Centrum, New York University (NYU), among others.
Personal life Gretta was born in Athens in 1947"Gretta Alegre Sarfaty Evocative Recollections", Internationaal Cultureel Centrum Bulletin, 1 February 1980. Reproduced in an untitled web page, website of Sartorial Art. to parents of Italian, Greek and Turkish origin, and was named Alegre Sarfaty. In 1954, her family moved to São Paulo, Brazil."Gretta Alegre Sarfaty", Escritório de Arte.
Artistic career Throughout her career Gretta exhibited mainly in São Paulo, New York and London. In the 70s, she participated in numerous solo shows in Brazil displaying her early paintings. Her world travels and mixed background had an influence on her more contemporary visual work – particularly her photography and collages which deal with themes of identity and culture. Marchant's work spans a wide range of media including installations, photography, video, paintings, and performance art.
Brazil and Europe At the beginning of the 1970s, she started creating the Metamorphosis series of paintings, and her work was noted by the Brazilian gallerist Franco Terranova, who participated in the Bienal Internacional de Arte de São Paulo in 1975. In 1976, he showed her works in the Galeria de Arte Global in São Paulo. In 1979, she had several shows in Germany (Karlsruhe) and in Italy (Galleria Diagramma, Milan; Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara) and also in Paris at the Centre Georges Pompidou, where she performed the Evocative Recollections. In 1980, she held the exhibition Evocative Recollections & Transformations at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea (MAC/São Paulo). In 1983, she created a series of paintings with a book dedicated to the Brazilian culture, Self-Portrait of Brazil, a publication containing a series of paintings by the artist and texts about important personalities from the country. It was exhibited at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) and was part of the 2011 exhibition Arte como Registro, Registro como Arte, na Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo.
Auto-Photos This series of photos from 1976 is one of the first Marchant's artworks dedicated to female identity and its various demonstrations: her face appears in sequences of beauty and ugliness, grace and madness. A frivolous play with recurrent images of herself is in fact an ironic dialogue with the constructed cultural image of a woman. Marchant expresses in this series the notion of gender performativity, a term created by Judith Butler in 1988.
Roberto Pontual wrote about this work:
The work of Gretta has been originally more related to the language of photography, especially during her recent stay in Europe. Her main focus has always been the female body, including her own body as a symbol of women's condition in our society. Quoted in "Auto Photos 1976-1986". Marchant's website.
Transformations This work also focuses on the topic of deconstructing the female image. Marchant's face is being manipulated and distorted.
Rather than the manifestation of personal destructive tendencies, these images should be viewed as the externalisation of a revolt directed against the male cultural stereotype, mortifying as it does the feminine form into the authoritarian and distorting dimension of an abstract and aesthetic beauty, to which the artist opposes the angry vision of a reverse side, through a body that is deformed, disfigured and fragmented. Quoted in "Transformations 1976-1986", Sarfaty Marchant's website.
A Women's Diary Another work from 1976, where Marchant uses photography to create a diary of her own body, captured in almost abstract poses. The way that the body appears on the photos calls into question its materiality.
Evocative Recollections
In 1979, she performed Evocative Recollections (performance with catalogue) in Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, as well as in Palazzo dei Diamanti di Ferrara, Italy.Elvio Becheroni, "Dal «continente-donna». Una intelligente denuncia della condizione feminile nel mondo", L'Arena di Verona, 24 March 1979, p.37. Reproduced in an untitled web page, website of Sartorial Art. This performance was then shown in different locations in Belgium (Internationaal Cultureel Centrum, Antwerp), Brazil and Italy. Under the same title, Evocative Recollections, Marchant continued the topic of female body and women's liberation in the series of photos (1980–1981). In an essay published for Marchant's solo exhibition at the Centro Culturale La Filanda (Verano Italy) Gillo Dorfles wrote about this series:
Sure: such pictures will not be the same with another artist, with another option, however, even considered under a point of view of photographic document, Gretta's corporeal options reach an unusual efficacy. We are in front of a little common combination, between the creative activity of an artist who knows how to enjoy the expressive dynamic and plastic possibilities of her body and the realisation of a photographic documentation which remains autonomous as well as in its technical as in its aesthetic values. Quoted in "Evocative Recollections", Sarfaty Marchant's website.
New York In 1983, Marchant moved to New York and after a traumatic event, the fire in the Hotel Chelsea,Randy Diamond, "Fire in Hotel Chelsea" (unidentified newspaper article), reproduced in an untitled web page, website of Sartorial Art ("2009 Sartorial Contemporary Art"). she began a collaboration with American video and multimedia artists (InterComm group). She also started to discover Kabbalah esoteric thought: she became friends with Simon Jacobson and Kenny Vance and she decided to picture the Kabbalah community in her paintings (Kabbalah, 1984–1985). She also created a performance, Goya Time (1985) and a video, My Single Life in New York (1987).
By the time she was represented by the New York-based gallery, Foster Goldstrom Fine Arts, she was involved in the artistic and cultural life of the city and she got to know Arthur Penn, with whom she collaborated in 1993 on his film The Portrait.
Some important exhibitions held in New York were Body Works at the Foster Goldstrom Gallery in 1983. The same year he participated in the Body Works & Evocative Recollections at the Keith Green Gallery. In 1984 he had his work exhibited at the inauguration of the Trump Tower.
Body Works In the late '80s and early '90s, Marchant created a photographic series of Body Works, where naked bodies constitute a denunciation of the hedonistic and alienating practices to which the female form is submitted, a denunciation of the repression and mystification to which women's education exposes them from every direction. And they are an affirmation of the real sensuality of women, which respectability nonetheless still attempts to hide or to repress (the curtain or the mosquito net). And so, like gallery owner Romana Loda, we can quote Hugo Von Hofmannsthal when he said: "The profound should be hidden. Where? On the surface." Quoted in "Body Works 1976", Sarfaty Marchant's website.
Gretta & Becheroni: Change and Appropriation of an Autonomous Identity VideoThe video is made in 1980 in collaboration with Elvio Becheroni. Marchant perform in a cube made of paper ribbons, making herself a passage through the space. It is a metaphoric way to the new identity. This work evidences the prison of the woman in the society through its voyeuristic aspect, evoking a ritual of liberation. This work was exhibited in the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo and in other countries like Argentina, Italy and the USA. Video Gretta & Becheroni: Change and Appropriation of an Autonomous Identity, 1980.
Goya Time Inter-disciplinary multimedia event with 100 artists, curated by Marchant, Sandro Dernini, and Butch Morris. Marchant wrote a script and directed this art opera inspired by Francisco de Goya's artworks. The performance took place in 1985, in "Quando", church and a car park at the Lower East Side, New York.The video is Vídeo La Maja, Goya Time, 1985.
Virtual Body Works 1988/2013 During the spring of 1987, Marchant was invited to participate in an interactive telecommunications event, Who Killed Heinrich Hertz?,The video is created by InterComm (Timothy Binkley, George M. Chaikin, Ira Schneider and Willoughby Sharp). She became involved in collaborative work with each of the above video artist. In 1988 Ira Schneider created a video dedicated to Marchant.The video is
Myth VideoThe video is produced by Denny Daniel, in 2003. It is a compilation of snapshots of Marchant, manipulated with a kaleidoscopic effect and juxtaposed with scenes from Marchant's everyday life. The structure of the movie remains the style of music videos from the late 80s.
London In 1995, she moved to London and married Richard Marchant, "the leading Oriental ceramics dealer". She continued creating photography related to questions of femininity and identity and was represented for the gallery Wolseley Fine Arts. From 2005, he founded his own artist-run gallery, Sartorial Contemporary Arts, a gallery designed to promote exhibitions of young artists as well as his own.
Reflections of a Woman Woman as a central artistic subject appears not only in her auto-portraits but also in the series of paintings dedicated to an issue of female identity and body, Reflections of a Woman (1997). It was exhibited in the Wolseley Fine Arts, London, in 1997."London First for Brazilian Artist", Antiques Bulletin, 29 November – 5 December 1997, issue 718, p.3. Reproduced in an untitled web page, website of Sartorial Art.
In this series of paintings Gretta is talking not only about herself, but also about other women. She has found a way to represent women's nature. It is not her body any more, but every woman's body. They can still be self-portraits, but they also are portraits of the women of today, full of confidence about their own identity and conscious of their power. Quoted in "Reflections of a Woman, Sarfaty Marchant's website.
Myth of Womanhood, 2001-2005