Homage to My Father (Projeto H. O.) is one of the few screenprints produced by Oiticica while he was living in New York during the 1970s. It is partially inspired by _Mangue Bangue (_1971), a film by Oiticica's friend and collaborator Neville D'Almeida about Rio de Janeiro's Mangue neighborhood. Before he moved to New York, Oiticica's work had been keenly focused on the haphazard, vernacular architecture of the favelas, or slums, surrounding the city. Homage to My Father suggests that focus through its poetic composition, where the wordplay of "mangue bangue" (which combines the name of the Rio neighborhood with the violent bang associated with gunfire)) is designed in bright orange-red. Oiticica's father—an engineer and entomologist who turned to photography to improve his studies of butterflies and other insects—inspired, in part, the artist's lifelong search for a union of art and lived experience.
Gallery label from Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960–1980, September 5, 2015–January 3, 2016.
