Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This interview with art dealer Thomas Cohn took place on the occasion of the fifth anniversary celebration of the opening of his gallery in Rio de Janeiro. The background of those first five years is the pictorial axiology of the Geração 80, [...]

In this text, North American curator Dan Cameron asserts that it is difficult to take stock of the vast work and public role of São Paulo-based gallerist Marcantonio Vilaça. The text holds that Vilaça performed a crucial mission in forging a [...]

Icleia Borsa Cattani discusses in this document the possibility of egalitarian, respectful cultural exchanges in Latin America, especially in the current context of social inequality aggravated by globalization. In her opinion, events that take place [...]

The author of this article, Rodrigo Naves, explains that Ronaldo Brito’s essay presents an overview of a movement that was representative of contemporary Brazilian art. Naves also suggests that Brito’s critique attempts to understand works that [...]

In this text, Ronaldo Brito analyzes Amilcar de Castro’s work in the media of sculpture and drawing. He discusses the connections between de Castro’s production and modern sculpture. Brito asserts that de Castro’s art formulates a rejection of [...]

In this statement, Ronaldo Brito takes the opportunity to clarify that the journal he cofounded, Malasartes, marked a moment in the Brazilian art world where there were different meanings for the various cultural participants. In his opinion, the [...]

The introduction/preface written by Ricardo Basbaum explains the collection of texts with a range of perspectives, from critics, artists, art researchers, and historians (many published earlier, and some out of circulation). His purpose was to [...]

This text is an analysis of the two years that had passed since the opening of the Divisão de Artes Plásticas do CCSP (Centro Cultural São Paulo), reorganized in 1989. Stella Teixeira de Barros emphasizes that in spite of remaining fairly distant [...]

In this critical text, Frederico Morais asserts that Marcos Benjamim’s work looks to childhood experiences in the province of Minas Gerais, where Morais himself grew up, turning them into a way of life. As a child, the artist was surrounded by [...]

João Cândido Galvão retrospectively analyzes Fernando Velloso’s work. The essay describes Velloso’s artistic career in the early 1970s and his work as a figurative artist before becoming interested in geometric abstraction. In the 1980s, he [...]

This text by art critic Alberto Tassinari was written for Nuno Ramos’s solo exhibition at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC-USP) in 1988. The show featured the artist’s most recent production based on “piles [...]

This text by art critic Alberto Tassinari addresses the group Casa 7’s participation in the 1985 edition of the São Paulo Biennial. One of the characteristics of the group’s new strain of research is, according to Tassinari, the “arrangement [...]

Brazilian Sônia Salzstein discusses the contemporary concepts of “sculpture,” using the thinking of the US art historian Rosalind Krauss as a point of departure. Salzstein’s objective is to examine what distinguishes modern sculpture from [...]

In this text, Sérgio Romagnolo, who is associated with Brazilian art of the eighties, reveals the motivation for his work, which is mainly a fascination with consumerism and the deception it brings. He believes that his art encompasses not only the [...]

In this text, Julio Plaza questions the notion of the “Geração ‘80” that circulated widely in Brazil. Brazilian art criticism used that term to define new artistic production that differed from the experimentalism prevalent in the seventies; [...]

Adriano Pedrosa wrote this text on Iran do Espírito Santo’s work for the 1999 edition of the Biennale di Venezia. Pedrosa asserts that any perception of “the real” depends on the language used to express it. That is evident in do Espírito [...]

This is a review of the sculptural pieces that were produced by Sergio Romagnolo and shown at the 19th Bienal de São Paulo in 1987. In the author’s opinion the hybrid nature of Romagnolo’s three-dimensional works is one of their most outstanding [...]

Art critic Paulo Herkenhoff argues that Adriana Varejão’s painting references historical frameworks that contain indelible traits of Brazilian colonial culture and art. Her work is bound to the baroque of Minas Gerais, and to the rococo, not by [...]

In the view of Tadeu Chiarelli, Jac Leirner’s art eludes any attempt at generic classification or positivist catalogization. The Brazilian artist works in series, removing objects from the flow of consumer goods until they are captured or grasped. [...]

This text was written by the Brazilian art critic and professor Tadeu Chiarelli about the exhibition Lusco Fusco (1993), by the São Paulo artist Caetano de Almeida, at the Luisa Strina gallery in that city. The writer observes that Caetano de [...]

The Brazilian artist Ricardo Basbaum analyzes the work of the sculptor and painter Sérgio Romagnolo. The writer emphasizes that Romagnolo’s investigations related to common spaces actually involve the entire process in which the artist’s task is [...]

This is an interview conducted by the artist Luiz Paulo Baravelli with the painter Leda Catunda, who comments on two painting trends in São Paulo in the 1980s: subject and figure. She talks about her approach to art of the prior decade and cites the [...]

This text by art critic Aracy Amaral presents the 1985 exhibition Del Grupo 7 held at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de São Paulo, which she directed at the time. In it, Amaral examines the outstanding pictorial characteristics of a new [...]

In this text, critic and curator Aracy Amaral presents the group show “Pintura como meio,” held at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo in 1983. According to Amaral, who was the director of the museum [...]

In this text, Guy Brett discusses work by Mira Schendel. Brett focuses on her drawings from the sixties, including the 1966 series entitled Droguinhas—a word made up by the artist’s daughter, Ada, to refer to “little nothings” or worthless [...]

The art-making process undertaken by Ivens Machado is outlined here by another artist, Milton Machado. The purpose of the text was to introduce an exhibition of work by Ivens as part of the program Ciclo de Escultura, organized by FUNARTE (Fundação [...]

Iveraldo Lucerna clarifies that this text is a simple account of the activities carried out at the Núcleo de Arte Contemporânea (NAC) of the Universidade Federal da Paraíba. That institution was founded to bridge the distance between the realms of [...]

This text by British contemporary art critic Guy Brett was published on the occasion of an exhibition of work by Jac Leirner, A Bill of Wrongs, held at Galeria Millan in São Paulo in 1989. In it, Brett asserts that Leirner’s work mocks structural [...]

This document presents the show A Nova Dimensão do Objeto curated by Aracy Amaral for the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo in 1986. Without attempting to collapse the difference between sculptural works and [...]

This anonymous article bemoans the failure of Assis Chateaubriand’s initiative to build regional museums in Brazil. The author does not blame Chateaubriand, a businessman based in São Paulo, for the failure, but instead focuses on the [...]

This article discusses the initiative to open regional art museums in key Brazilian cities other than the hegemonic centers of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The force behind the project was newspaper magnate Assis Chateaubriand who had [...]

This essay by Oswaldo Louzada Filho speculates on the experience of a pedestrian who is converted into an observer by visiting a contemporary art gallery, describing the movement of that individual through the exhibition space, as well as the [...]

[This text offers] perspective on Amazonian sensibility, through which the author proposes a radical shift by marginalizing the “elitist” focus. According to this vision, the history of the cultural production of that region has been “a tragic [...]

Using a good series of literary metaphors, Cláudio de La Roque Leal presents the photographic work produced by Cláudia Leão during the mid-1990s. He considers it a visual reflection on the perennial character of images and their connection to [...]

In this presentation of his research, Rubens Fernandes Júnior attempts to provide an overview of photography from the state of Paraná in southern Brazil, placing it in wider historical and geographic context. The author not only summarizes the most [...]

This text was the introduction to the exhibition Fotografia Contemporânea do Pará - Novas Visões, held in Rio de Janeiro (Fundação Nacional de Artes - Funarte) as well as at Niterói (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro), both in 1998. The [...]

Adriano Pedrosa, curator of the segment “Arte Contemporânea Brasileira” in the 24th International Biennial of São Paulo (1998), states that the name of the exhibition he is curating raises the following question: “What art is (not) [...]

This commentary by Mário Pedrosa centers on the large audiences that admired and interacted with the works exhibited at the IX São Paulo Biennial (1969). He states that: “art has ceased to be that distant and humorless thing, that terribly [...]

This essay on the work of Antonio Manuel was written by the concrete poet Décio Pignatari, who referred to the artist as “the cock of the golden eggs.” On the subject of contemporary art issues, the author describes the friction between the [...]

This text discusses the Antonio Manuel exhibition that took place within a publication of wide circulation instead of a museum or a gallery. The document “Exposição de Antonio Manuel (de las cero a las 24 horas en los estands de revistas)” [ [...]

In this interview with artist Antonio Manuel by critic Francisco Bittencourt, Manuel speaks of his early career, mentioning specifically the Salão da Bússola [Compass Salon]; the Corpobra [Body-Work] action in which he appeared naked at the Salão [...]

This essay, written by the art critic Roberto Pontual, is a biographical and artistic profile of the artist Roberto Magalhães, in which the author underscores Magalhães’ penchant for working independently from his colleagues in the Nova Figura [...]

This volume from the ABC – Arte Brasileira Contemporânea collection published by the Fundação Nacional das Artes (FUNARTE) addresses artist Wesley Duke Lee. In it, art critic Cacilda Teixeira da Costa provides an overview of Duke Lee’s [...]

This book about Waltercio Caldas is part of the ABC—Arte Brasileira Contemporânea—collection published by Funarte (Fundacão Nacional das Artes). A slim volume, it has a “Preface” and includes the artist’s remarks about some of his works, [...]

Book from the ABC collection (Arte Brasiliera Contemporânea), edited by FUNARTE  (Fundação Nacional das Artes). The volume is dedicated to Rubens Gerchman, and it presents his work alongside a poem by Armando Freitas Filho, using passages that [...]

This book on artist Cildo Meireles forms part of the ABC—Arte Brasileira Contemporânea—a collection published by the Fundação Nacional de Artes (Funarte), a governmental organization with headquarters in Rio de Janeiro. The volume contains the [...]

This book is part of the ABC (Arte Brasileira Contemporânea) collection, published by Funarte (Fundação Nacional das Artes). As the title suggests, Artur Barrio is about the artist; it includes a selection of his essays, illustrated with a variety [...]

In this text, published in the catalogue for an exhibition held at the Galeria Raquel Arnaud in 1993, Maria Alice Milliet sets forth an overall analysis of the artwork of Nazareth Pacheco. In this artist, the writer sees a set of qualities capable of [...]

In this presentation of an exhibition of work by Rosana Paulino held in 1997, art critic Aracy Amaral places emphasis on innovative features of Paulino’s work that mark a break with the Brazilian art scene of the time. She specifically mentions [...]

According to the curator Aracy Amaral, the works produced by the new generation of artists are very different from what was done during the previous decade, in the 1980s, a period that was defined by humor and a euphoric attempt to reinvigorate [...]