A Collection of Art
and Affections

The Coleção Josemar Antonio brings together 165 works by 104 artists, made between 1952 and 2026. It is a collection formed in Salvador, and it is from Bahia that it looks out at Brazil.

Private collections are usually read through their most prominent names. This one asks for another reading. What organises it is neither a market line nor a school, but a way of keeping company: works that arrived through encounter, through exchange, as gifts. The name the collector gave the whole — A Collection of Art and Affections — is not an ornament. It is the criterion.

A collection on paper

Almost five in every ten works are on paper: 81 in total, among prints, drawings, monotypes, photographs and impressions. Printmaking alone accounts for 31 works. It is a figure that describes the collection better than any statement of intent — paper is the support of art that circulates, that is given as a gift, that fits in a folder and crosses the country with the artist.

Scale confirms it. The median longest side is 33 cm, and 74 of the 162 measured works are no larger than 30 cm. This is not a collection of grand formats waiting for a warehouse. It is a collection for the walls of a house, made for daily company — which is, again, a decision about affection before it is a decision about art.

Masters and contemporaries on the same wall

The most consistent trait of the collection is its refusal of any hierarchy between popular and contemporary art. Five master saint-carvers and ceramists — Albertino, Antônio Carlos, Maurício, Reis and Toinho, nearly all from Piauí — share the collection with Marina Rheingantz, Lucia Koch, Dora Longo Bahia, Vicente de Mello and Alice Brill. José Adário dos Santos, blacksmith of the saints of the Ladeira da Conceição da Praia, is here for the same reason as Carybé and Hansen Bahia: because the work matters.

This proximity is not a curatorial gesture applied afterwards. It is the effect of a route — of studios visited, of fairs, of public conversations, of friendships with artists. The collection does not sort Brazil into categories; it records it as someone who walks through it.

A geography that is not only Bahian

Bahia is the base — the largest group of artists identified by origin. But the map opens strongly towards the North and Centre-West: Pará, Goiás, Piauí, alongside Rio Grande do Sul, Pernambuco, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. For a collection formed in Salvador, this is an unusual reach, and the explanation is simple: the collector goes where the art is being made.

A living collection

81 of the works date from 2020 onward. That does not make the collection a contemporary slice — the oldest work is from 1952 — but it shows that it is being formed now, following artists at work, many of them early in their careers. Collecting, here, is also a way of sustaining production.

The documented provenance of some works says the rest: a print from the Clube de Gravuras at MAM São Paulo, works given by artist friends, a piece that came through another collector. Each of those lines is a relationship recorded on a catalogue card.