This poster was designed to promote the inaugural Exposição nacional de arte concreta: artes visuais, which was presented in December 1956 at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM-SP) and in January–February 1957 at the Ministério da Educação e Cultura (MEC) in Rio de Janeiro. The exhibition included works by painters and poets (who displayed poems expressed as posters), sculptures, drawings, and other visual works of art. There were also lectures and presentations that addressed and discussed the guiding principles of Concrete art.  

According to the poet Décio Pignatari, the exhibition marked the first time that Brazilian avant-garde artists and poets had come together for such an event. The event included works by the visual artists Geraldo de Barros (1923−1998), Aluísio Carvão (1920−2001), Lygia Clark (1920−1988), Waldemar Cordeiro (1925−1973), João José da Silva Costa (born 1931), Judith Lauand (born 1922), Maurício Nogueira Lima (1930−1999), Luís Sacilotto (1924−2003), Alfredo Volpi (1896−1988), Alexandre Wollner (born 1928), Lothar Charoux (1912−1987), Amilcar de Castro (1920−2002), and Ivan Serpa (1923−1973). In addition to Pignatari, the poets Haroldo and Augusto de Campos (brothers), Ferreira Gullar, and Ronaldo Azeredo were also included in the event.

The first Exposição nacional de arte concreta gave rise to a national forum that fostered debate about emerging trends in the fields of poetry and Concrete art. It drew attention to the work of Brazilian Concrete artists and noted the differences that could already be seen between local groups and trends. The paulistas, artists in São Paulo, concentrated on form and structure, as per their 1952 Manifiesto ruptura (Rupture Manifesto): “History as seen through a qualitative leap,” “renewal of the essential values of the visual arts: space-time, movement, and matter,” and “knowledge based on concepts,” among other subjects. Meanwhile, the cariocas, in Rio de Janeiro, emphasized the use of intuition in art. The exhibition thus laid out a few parameters of the imminent Neo-Concrete break led by Ferreira Gullar (1930–2016) a few years later, a step that ultimately led to his manifesto written in 1959 and signed by Amilcar de Castro, Franz Weissmann (1911−2005), Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape (1927−2004), Reynaldo Jardim (born 1926), and Theon Spanudis (born 1915).       

[See the article about the differences mentioned above in the ICAA digital archive: “Paulistas e Cariocas” by the critic and theorist Mário Pedrosa; this article was originally published in Jornal do Brasil (February 19, 1957) (doc. no. 1085056)].