Carlito Carvalhosa (1961–2021) produced works that move between painting, sculpture, and installation, based on the experimentation of different materials and formats. In addition to the works, the artist has built up a broad documentary archive, maintained over four decades of work, between 1980 and 2021. Along with a hundred notebooks that preserve notes on his processes and flows of thought, the Carlito Carvalhosa Estate brings together individual notes, photographs, videos, press clippings, folders and exhibition catalogs, letters sent and received, models and studies of works, as well as carried out and unpublished projects. In the collection of documents created by the artist, art and life are intertwined, forming a very particular memory system.

The Carlito Carvalhosa Estate was created at the initiative of the artist's family after his early death at the age of 59, in May 2021, as an instrument aimed at the conservation, organization, research and dissemination of his work. Headquartered in São Paulo, the Estate brings together the historical documentary archive, the technical reserve of works and the materials from the dismantling of his studio, managed by a team of professionals in the areas of research and museology. Since June 2021, the Estate has been working to carry out a comprehensive cataloguing of Carvalhosa's work, aiming at the creation of a catalogue raisonné of the artist. At the same time, restoration actions are carried out on the works that make up the technical reserve and an effort to digitize the documents, which has resulted, so far, in a bank of about 20 thousand images of different typologies.

The Carlito Carvalhosa Estate works to ensure that the artist's work fulfills its purpose of continuing in constant transformation, based on frictions with the present time. The tensions between temporalities are, after all, a matter dear to his creations. In this case, remembering is not the opposite of forgetting – it is more like a mirror image, which continues to produce new relationships from the movement in time and space. Such is the project of the Estate: to maintain the artist's legacy as a work in process.

Carlito Carvalhosa Estate

Coordination:
Mari Stockler
Maria Carvalhosa
Cecilia Carvalhosa

Curatorship and Research:
Lúcia K. Stumpf

Management:
Paula Azevedo
Heloísa Bediks