Gretta Sarfaty

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.

[9] 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.

This series of photos from 1976 is one of the first Marchant's artworks dedicated to female identity and its various demonstrations: her face appears in sequences of beauty and ugliness, grace and madness.

[14] Marchant's face is being manipulated and distorted: Rather than the manifestation of personal destructive tendencies, these images should be viewed as the externalisation of a revolt directed against the male cultural stereotype, mortifying as it does the feminine form into the authoritarian and distorting dimension of an abstract and aesthetic beauty, to which the artist opposes the angry vision of a reverse side, through a body that is deformed, disfigured and fragmented.

Under the same title, Evocative Recollections, Marchant continued the topic of female body and women's liberation in the series of photos (1980–1981).

In an essay published for Marchant's solo exhibition at the Centro Culturale La Filanda (Verano Italy) Gillo Dorfles wrote about this series: Sure: such pictures will not be the same with another artist, with another option, however, even considered under a point of view of photographic document, Gretta's corporeal options reach an unusual efficacy.

We are in front of a little common combination, between the creative activity of an artist who knows how to enjoy the expressive dynamic and plastic possibilities of her body and the realisation of a photographic documentation which remains autonomous as well as in its technical as in its aesthetic values.

[17]In 1983 Marchant moved to New York[7] and after a traumatic event, the fire in the Hotel Chelsea,[18] she began a collaboration with American video and multimedia artists (InterComm group).

By the time she was represented by the New York-based gallery, Foster Goldstrom Fine Arts, she was involved in the artistic and cultural life of the city and she got to know Arthur Penn, with whom she collaborated in 1993 on his film The Portrait.

And they are an affirmation of the real sensuality of women, which respectability nonetheless still attempts to hide or to repress (the curtain or the mosquito net).

During the spring of 1987, Marchant was invited to participate in an interactive telecommunications event, Who Killed Heinrich Hertz?,[n 3] created by InterComm (Timothy Binkley, George M. Chaikin, Ira Schneider and Willoughby Sharp).

[21]The title itself is a provocative statement by the artist in relation to the Female versus Feminism issue, and how the use and abuse of that subject has now become a cliché.

Separate images were used to create fun compositions through symmetry, which are intended to transport the viewer back to the illusion of childhood.

The installation is a cosmological ricochet which is conceptualized through repeated images of bananas, self portraits and geometric exegesis in ordered sequences in front of a symbol of the Shield of David.

Marchant has curated several of its shows including Notting Heaven (2008), Mothers (2008), Remember My Name (2008), Burning Candy (2008), Obsession (2006) and Water (2006).

[citation needed] In 2010 she has exhibited in the show Bad Girls, together with Marina Abramović, Annette Messager, Orlan and Gina Pane.

[citation needed] In 2013 she had works exhibited in the show Ainda: O livro como Performance curated by Amir Brito Cadôr at the Museu de Arte da Pampulha in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

[24] The exhibition at Galeria Pilar in São Paulo represents the first individual of the artist in Brazil after the period when she lived out of the country, dividing her work between New York and London.

"Reconciliation" brings a new series of works where the body, an outstanding element of Safarty's artistic career, returns to the painting, video art, engraving and photograph presents at the exhibition.

In December 2019, Gretta opened the exhibition Reconciliações at the Instituto dos Arquitetos do Brasil, a project contemplated by the Cultural Incentive Law - Lei Rouanet.

Gretta also participated in the group exhibition "Estratégias do Feminino" at Farol Santander in Porto Alegre, the show brings together about 95 works by 53 female artists, produced between the beginning of the 20th century and up to the present day.