Bodies of Color

Historians credit Hélio Oiticica and his 1967 Tropicália exhibition in Rio de Janeiro with triggering an explosion of cultural upheaval, soon to be suppressed by years of military dictatorship in Brazil. While the music of Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, and the movement that became known as Tropicalismo, continued to have a lasting influence on world music ever since, the groundbreaking aspects of ‘nova objetividade brasileira’ in the visual arts were largely undervalued.

Hélio Oiticica’s work, alongside that of fellow contemporary artist Lygia Clark, first resurfaced at the 1997 documenta in Kassel, where it caused stunned reactions. Why had it taken so long for curators to (re)discover these Latin American artists whose radical conceptual and performative ideas offered a unique articulation of modernism through (and post) abstraction?

Now Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980) is considered a major player. His and Clark’s incorporation of time and the sensate body at the center of their inventions gives them broad international significance and casts new light on past decades of performance and hybrid art practices. Their work comments in a unique way on today’s aesthetic debate on ...