![]() ![]() The book also contains a wide selection of reproductions of the artist’s work, sketches, drawings and plans for projects, as well as texts and notes by Oiticica himself, all accompanied by extensive biographical material. Later he spent periods in London and New York before returning to Brazil, where he died in 1980 at the age of 43.Ī catalogue has been published to accompany the exhibition with texts by Haroldo de Campos, Guy Brett, Waly Salomão and Catherine David. Positioning himself audaciously between the avant-garde, Brazilian popular culture, the realities of Third World «underdevelopment» and ‘60s radicalism, he came to reflect deeply on the issues concerning «art», «invention», and «liberty» in contemporary conditions.Ī product of the brilliant explosion of artistic activity in Brazil in the 1950s and 1960s, which encompassed music, cinema, architecture, poetry and the visual arts, Hélio Oiticica took an advanced position with his innovative Bólides, Penetrables and Parangolés of the mid ‘60s. Hélio Oiticica was both artist and thinker. ![]() Although well-known in Brazil, Hélio Oiticica has only gradually come to be recognized internationally as one of the most profound and adventurous artists of recent times. Perhaps a memorial to Oiticica’s beloved favela community, it is also, like its companions, an infinitely variable work of art, newly made by each viewer who passes through it.Hélio Oiticica, born in Rio de Janeiro in 1937, was the son of an entomologist who was also a photographer and painter, and the grandson of a philologist and anarchist leader. If you signed a waiver, you could climb up a short gravel path, through a bowerlike construction of corrugated aluminum, chicken wire, sheet metal and sacking, and slither down the gravel slope on the other side. The third work on view, made after Oiticica’s return to Brazil in 1978, is an abstracted slice of favela architecture. Traversing corridors sporadically hung with curtains made of dark fabric, clear colored vinyl and white netting, viewers encounter a TV and transistor radios tuned to local stations, speakers broadcasting readings by Gertrude Stein and Haroldo de Campos, and, finally, an old-fashioned dispenser where they may help themselves to a drink of orange juice. This mazelike structure of unpainted plywood and colored Plexiglas was included in the show. In self-imposed exile in New York, Oiticica came up with the less culturally specific (while still tropically flavored) Filter Penetrable (1972). But even before then, he fretted that Tropicalism had commodified the culture of Brazil’s marginalized, overwhelmingly nonwhite poor. Musicians were forced into exile by 1970 Oiticica had, as he put it, jumped ship. Tropicalism’s ecstatic, emancipatory message was anathema to Brazil’s military regime, which quickly suppressed it. Neo-Concretos: Neo-Concretismo came together in March 1959, when the Manifesto neoconcreto was published in the Jornal do BrasilRio de Janeiro’s leading newspaperand signed by a group of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo artists who had been part of Grupo Frente (195456) and Arte concreta. (It even took its name from Oiticica’s 1967 environment Tropicália, a Penetrable featuring plants and live parrots.) Oiticica’s work of this time provided much of the visual identity for Brazil’s Tropicalism movement-a primarily musical phenomenon of the late 1960s that likewise fused local and global influences. Immersing himself in the life of the shantytown, Oiticica started to make artworks that simultaneously engaged avant-garde developments, such as Happenings, and Brazilian popular culture, designating billiard rooms and street repairs as art and creating cape-like costumes (Parangolés) to be worn by Mangueira’s inhabitants. In 1964 Oiticica began attending samba school in Mangueira, one of Rio’s oldest favelas. The exterior and interior walls are variously painted orange and yellow after stepping inside, visitors can manipulate the panels to change the color and shape of the space in which they are standing. ![]() The show opened with Penetrable PN1 (1960)-a plywood cubicle divided into four quadrants by vertical panels, some fixed and others movable. For Oiticica, this initially meant paintings that could be physically entered and explored. With the addition of gravel and live plants, the work playfully brings the real world, specifically the Global South, into the antiseptic space of art. ![]()
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