Born in 1951 in Bolivia, nationalized and residing in São Paulo, Brazil, since 1959, Norma Tenenholz Grinberg has held national and international exhibitions. As a visual artist, she is one of the major artistic standouts working with ceramics in the country. The quality of her work is acknowledged by both the public and the critics, who point out the originality and contemporary nature of her aesthetic proposal.
Norma Grinberg’s academic training includes an Arts Teaching Degree, with a Master’s and Doctor’s Degree in Visual Poetics from the Universidade de São Paulo (USP), where she is currently a senior professor in the Visual Arts Department. Her career is marked by awards and honorable mentions in events and exhibitions such as the 1st São Paulo Saloon for Contemporary Arts and the 26th Brazilian Congress on Ceramics, among others.
She has also received invitations for international conferences and exhibitions such as the Festival International du Film Ceramique in Montpellier and Le Printemps des Potiers in Bandol, France; the 47º Concorso Internazionale Della Ceramica D’Arte, Faenza, and Galleria D’arte Ítalo-Brasiliana, in Milan, Italy; and at Javits Convention Center, New York, USA; the Neue keramik aus Brasilien, Brasiléia Foundation, Basel, Switzerland, among others.
Norma exhibits her pieces in Brazil and abroad, and her work is part of national and international private and museum collections, such as Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo; USP Museum of Contemporary Art; Casa Porto das Artes, Espírito Santo; Mokiti Okada Foundation (M.O.A.- São Paulo); Museum of Contemporary Art of Curitiba; Alfredo Andersen Museum; Museu Oscar Niemeyer (MON), Curitiba; Cultural Foundation of Brasília – Brasília; CAPES Foundation – Brasilia. Fule International Ceramic Art Museum, China; National Museum of Sévres, France; Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche – Faenza – Italy; GIFU Prefectural Tajimi Hospital – Tajimi-City, Japan; Óbidos City Museum, Portugal; Uttarayan Art Center – Vadodara, India; New Taipei City Yingge Ceramics Museum, Taiwan. She is a member of the International Academy of Ceramics (IAC) since 2009.
Visit Norma Grinberg’s website and Instagram page.
Featured work
Perpetual Movement, 2023
A Journey to Diversity and Freedom, 2023
Fantastic Fauna – Tois, 2016-2020
Since the 1980s, I have created a series of modules using ceramic material. Interestingly, I realized that they could be manipulated in a fascinatingly open and playful manner. My involvement was such that I could no longer control the desire for continuity and development of this work.
As I played, everything became broader, more complex, challenging, and engaging. I noticed that even the path I followed was not predictable: IT SIMPLY HAPPENED.
And that’s what I want to show. I want to show a journey that begins with the creation of the modules, initially without interference, where I expose their plasticity and conceptual nature. Then, I delved into the world of creative openness that allowed me to interfere, juxtapose, aggregate, cut, join, and build. Thus, I created a body of work that was simply timeless; it happened naturally.
There are many ways to look, but what matters is what one sees. The manipulated modules create the strange and fascinating joy of discovering something new, unique, and original in each of us.
