Josemar Antônio

For Josemar Antônio, collecting is an extension of studio life — not a chapter apart from it.

An artist and collector based in Salvador, he has for years been forming a private collection that today holds 165 works by 104 artists. The collection has no premises and no exhibition programme: it exists as a catalogued body of work and as a public presence through the profile @colecao_josemar.antonio, where every work is published with its full record — artist, title, medium, dimensions, date, edition and collection.

It is an unusual cataloguing practice for a private collection. There is no work without a record, and almost always a text about the artist as well: where they were born, where they live and work, how they trained, what their work investigates. That work of registration — carried out post by post — is what made this digital catalogue possible. It was already there; it only needed gathering.

The method

Most works arrive through company. Encounters with artists, studio visits, exchanges between collectors, works given by friends. Some records state it plainly: gift of the artist and friend, gift of the collector and friend. Others came by formal routes — the Clube de Gravuras at MAM São Paulo, fairs and collecting projects.

The effect of this method shows in the whole. There is no market slice, no concentrated bet on one name or one generation. There are master saint-carvers from Piauí beside contemporary artists at the start of their careers, prints from the 1950s beside paintings from 2026. The criterion is the relationship with the work and with the person who made it.

Collecting as public conversation

In April 2026 Josemar Antônio took part in the conversation Art and Collecting at the Centro Cultural Banco da Amazônia in Belém, alongside the collector Eduardo Vasconcelos and moderated by the curator Vânia Leal — within the education programme of the exhibition Trajetórias — Contemporary Art from Pará.

The encounter is representative of how he understands the role of the collector: not to keep, but to circulate. Read the record of the conversation →

The collection as a work

Being himself an artist, Josemar Antônio collects from inside the field. That explains the attention to technique — the record never says merely “print”, it says intaglio print on paper, with the dimensions of the sheet and the plate given separately, and the number of the edition. It is the vocabulary of someone who knows the process from within.

And it explains the choice of name. A collection of art and affections is a collection that takes for granted that the two cannot be separated.