Nara Roesler presents Color Clímax, an exhibition that brings together two of Brazil’s most distinctive painters, Sergio Sister and Karin Lambrecht, to explore the transformative, emotional, and material force of color in contemporary art. Throughout art history, color has operated as painting’s most elusive yet persistent subject — an element capable of producing affect beyond discourse, suspending rhetoric, and asserting itself as pure luminous and opaque intensity. In Color Clímax, Sister and Lambrecht reveal how color can reach a point of culmination, a climactic threshold where painting becomes a planar body, as well as breath, and resonance.
Recognized as one of the leading abstract painters in the Americas, Sergio Sister has, since the late twentieth century, developed one of Brazil’s most extensive repertoires of monochromatic practice. After turning away from politically figurative work following the trauma of imprisonment during the dictatorship, Sister embraced the monochrome — not as reduction but as expansion, not as a pure form but as a transformative surface. His works, from modest panels to heteroclite object-assemblages, function as material bodies of paint in which subtle and dense chromatic intensities pulse interstitially along the edges of the plane. His signature ligações, which connect multiple panels in polyptych form, echo Lygia Clark’s “organic lines”: intervals that bind through their void, activating the work in structural tension.
Karin Lambrecht, in turn, brings a practice marked by an moving, spiritual, and visceral engagement with color. Lambrecht’s canvases appear like lungs rescued in extremis by the breath of color — surfaces where climactic density becomes palpable through washes, stains, and atmospheric fields. From these ethereal planes emerge visible “stigmata” — resonating with the legacy of Mira Schendel: erased writings, exuberant stitches, embroidered crosses, and knots that settle onto the surface like scars. Her painting treats the pictorial field as a living epidermis, a place where wound and radiance coexist.
Though distinct — Sister’s structures solid and precise, Lambrecht’s atmospheres expansive and bodily — the two artists converge in their understanding of color as an inexhaustible force. Both have recently deepened their engagement with works on paper, using the medium as a sensitive terrain capable of receiving mercurial, forceful, or delicately diffused chromatic affect.
Together, Sister and Lambrecht present painting not merely as image, but as a threshold where color reaches its highest expressive charge.