Concrete and Neo-Concrete artists in mid-century Brazil explored how the elements of a composition could challenge perception. Between the urban centers of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, these groups debated whether an artist’s hand should be visible and how abstract forms should be experienced. An artwork, wrote the critic Ferreira Gullar, is “a special object through which a synthesis of sensorial and mental experiences is intended to take place.”
Trained in graphic arts, advertising, and industrial design, the artists in this gallery drew from mathematical principles to render precise geometries. Playing with line, blocks of color, and sometimes even text, these experiments in composition are rhythmic and unstable, producing a sense of movement meant to be not only seen, but also felt.
Organized by Inés Katzenstein, Curator of Latin American Art and Director of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute, with Julia Detchon and Rachel Rosin, Curatorial Assistants, Department of Drawings and Prints.