Gretta Sarfaty Marchant

Gretta Sarfaty Marchant
Gretta Sarfaty Marchant, PerFormative, Sartorial Contemporary Art, 2011
Born	Alegre Sarfaty 1947 Athens
Nationality	British and Brazilian

Gretta Sarfaty Marchant (also known as Alegre Sarfaty, Gretta Sarfaty Grzywacz, Greta Sarfaty Marchant) is an artist and curator who lives and works in London, São Paulo and New York. Marchant has earned international acclaim as a feminist performance artist. Alongside her art she was the founder of the project-led space, Sartorial Contemporary Art (2005–2010) and since 2010 has been running a family trust the Alegre Sarfaty Collection.

Marchant was born in Athens in 1947 and was named Alegre Sarfaty, from parents of Italian, Greek and Turkish origin. In 1954, her family moved to São Paulo, Brazil. At the age of 17 she married José Grzywacz; she has three children from this marriage: Victoria Sarfaty Grzywacz, Pedro Grzywacz and Rafaela Grzywacz Goodman. She started creating her first artworks when she was 25. She continued her art studies in Brazil, and later lived and worked in Paris, Milan and New York.

Throughout her career Marchant exhibited mainly in São Paulo, New York and London. In the 70s she participated in numerous solo shows in Brazil displaying her early paintings. Her world travels and mixed background has had an important influence on her more contemporary visual work – particularly her photography and collages which deal in themes of identity and culture, although her art is not restricted just to the canvas. Marchant's work embraces a wide range of media including installation, photography, video, paintings and performance.

At the beginning of the 70s she started creating the series of paintings, Metamorphosis and her work was noted by the Brazilian gallerist, Franco Terranova. In 1976 he showed her works in the Galeria de Arte Global, in São Paulo. In 1979 she had several shows in Germany (Karlsruhe) and in Italy (Galleria Diagramma, Milan; Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara) and also in Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, where she performed the Evocative Recollections. In 1983 she created a series of paintings with a book, dedicated to the Brazilian culture, Self-Portrait of Brazil.