Continue Enrico Castellani (1930 - 2017) Enrico Castellani was born in Castelmassa, Italy, in 1930. Beginning in 1952, Castellani studied painting and sculpture at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels; he graduated from that city’s École de La Cambre in 1956 with a degree in architecture. Upon completing his studies, Castellani returned to Italy where he took a clerical position at a Milanese architecture firm. In the years just before 1960, nourished by the spirit of optimism promulgated by fellow Milanese artists such as Lucio Fontana, and enthusiastic about the potential of art freed from narrative constraints, Castellani produced a searching body of work that reveals the artist’s ability to transform canvases into original terrains. Works from this period include monochromes covered with tangled wires or dramatized by deep folds. In 1959 Castellani created the seminal Black Surface in Relief (Superficie nera in rilievo) by placing hazelnuts behind a canvas. Since 1959 Castellani has continued to reprocess the potent vocabulary established in that work, creating unexpected topographies by stretching canvases over arrangements of nail heads. Castellani’s personal artistic development in the late 1950s was tied to his active presence in the Milanese art scene. United by shared ideals, Castellani and Piero Manzoni established two short-lived but significant ventures in 1959: the publication Azimuth and Galleria Azimut (both 1959–60). Like Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, the founders of Düsseldorf’s Group Zero, Castellani and Manzoni were interested in disassociating themselves from Tachisme and Art Informel, and new artistic approaches were discussed, realized, and presented in both the publication and the gallery. A key example is Castellani’s essay “Continuity and Newness” (1960), published in the second of Azimuth’s two issues. Between December 1959 and July 1960, Galleria Azimut presented thirteen exhibitions, including Castellani’s first solo show, the group show La nuova concezione artistica (The New Artistic Conception), and a solo show devoted to Mack”s work. Castellani and Manzoni’s joint projects in 1959–60 established Milan as an important center of activity for ZERO, a rapidly expanding international network of artists committed to redefining art and engaging light, space, time, and movement.

Continue Waltercio Caldas At the start of the 1960s, Waltercio Caldas became interested in art and began to visit exhibitions in Rio de Janeiro. He studied with Ivan Serpa (1923 - 1973) at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro - MAM/RJ [Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro] from 1964 onwards. The everyday routine of lectures and visits to the museum`s collection brought him close to modern and contemporary production. In 1967, he began to work as a technical draughtsman and diagrammer for Eletrobrás and took part in his first professional group exhibition at the Gead Gallery. During this period, he drew and made models of improbable architectural projects. In 1975, he staged his individual exhibition A Natureza dos Jogos [The Nature of Games] at the, Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand - Masp [Assis Chateaubriand Museum of Art of São Paulo] consisting of 100 works, including drawings, objects and photographs. Three years later, he executed sculptures such as Convite ao Raciocínio [Invitation to Reason] and Objeto de Aço [Steel Object]. During this period, he created pieces that commented on the works of renowned figures in the history of art, executing the Experiência Mondrian [Mondrian Experience] and Talco sobre Livro Ilustrado de Henri Matisse [Talc on an Illustrated Book by Henri Matisse]. This latter work led to others based on books, such as Aparelhos [Devices], 1979, Manual de Ciência Popular [Popular Science Manual], 1982 andVelázquez, 1996. From the 1980s onwards, the artist created a greater number of installations. In 1980, he executed Ping Pong, and 0 É Um [Zero is One]. Three years later, he exhibited A Velocidade [Speed] at the 17th Bienal Internacional de São Paulo [São Paulo International Bienal]. At the same time, he worked on a series of sculptures, basically devoting himself to this medium during the second half of the decade. He made videos, drawings and almost invisible interventions in space, although his primary activity is sculpture. In 1989, his first public sculpture was installed: O Jardim Instantâneo no Parque do Carmo [The Instant Garden in the Parque do Carmo], in São Paulo, producing another open-air piece five years later: Omkring, in Norway. In 1996, he executed the monument Escultura para o Rio [Sculpture for Rio], in the centre of Rio de Janeiro, in which a synthesis of his work is apparent: the conceptual subtlety that has always characterized it, allied to a capacity for mobilizing a public space. Representing Brazil at the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997, he presented the Venice series in the Brazilian pavilion. He also participated in the Biennial of Visual Arts of Mercosul, Porto Alegre, with the installation "place for a soft stone", exposed earlier in the side event to the ECO92 at MAM, Rio de Janeiro .

Continue Nicolau Fachinetti (1824 - 1900) After three years in Venice, Nicolau Faccinetti moved to Rio de Janeiro after the 1848-9 revolution. He worked there first of all as a scene-painter for a theater. In 1865 he earned his certificate as lecturer at the Imperial Academy in Rio. From 1870 he turned to landscape painting, which he taught himself. He was encouraged in this by Princess Isabel, daughter of King Pedro II. Between 1880 and 1890 he developed his marine painters. Facchinetti was a naturalistic painter of open-air school; the accuracy of his landscapes was of first importance to him, which is why he nearly always annotated his works with details of the precise time and place depicted.

Continue Ismael Nery (1900 - 1934) Ismael Nery was a Brazilian Impressionist & Modern artist who was born in 1900. Their work was featured in exhibitions at the Fortes D'Aloia & Gabriel, Rio de Janeiro (Carpintaria) and the Fundación Malba. Ismael Nery's work has been offered at auction multiple times, with realized prices ranging from $3,686 USD to $19,656 USD, depending on the size and medium of the artwork. Since 2013 the record price for this artist at auction is $19,656 USD for Bufão, sold at James Lisboa Auction in 2018. The artist died in 1934.

Continue Cildo Meireles One of the most influential conceptual artists today, Cildo Meireles creates complex installations and sculptures that entice the viewer and challenge political, philosophical, and aesthetic precepts. Meireles’s artistic practice was shaped by the social and political conditions during the dictatorship of Brazil in the 1960s and ‘70s, and by the Neo-Concretist and avant-garde artists Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica. Like his predecessors, Meireles merges physical, cerebral, and sensorial elements in works that elicit audience participation. While Meireles’s works are often created in response to specific political events and situations, they evoke universal themes that are communicated through the viewer’s experience in a shared, rigorously designed and defined space. Meireles’s work has been the subject of several large-scale exhibitions at renowned institutions. In 2013, a retrospective organized by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Spain, traveled to the Fundação de Serralves, Portugal, and the HangarBicocca, Italy, the following year. In 2008, Meireles had a full-scale retrospective at the Tate Modern, England; the exhibition traveled through 2010 to the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain, and the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico. His work is represented in major museums and institutions around the world including the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Inhotim Centro de Arte Contemporânea, Brazil; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Finland; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Museo d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain; Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Belgium; and Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom. Meireles was born in 1948 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he currently lives and works.

Oswaldo Goeldi Cildo Meireles Frans Krajcberg Di Cavalcanti Alfredo Volpi Hélio Oiticica Tarsila do Amaral Instant Puzzles . Cildo Meireles Cildo Meireles Cildo Meireles is an internationally-renowned Brazilian sculptor and painter who creates objects and installations that immerse the observer directly into a complete sensorial experience. Much of his work plumbs such themes as the military dictatorship in Brazil and the country’s dependence on the global economy. ​ The Exhibition ​ Instant enigmas, produced in 2018 by Escritório de Arte Paulo Kuczynski, exhibited previously unseen work by Cildo Meireles, an icon of contemporary Brazilian art, alongside other pieces from the 1970s and 80s, all true to his characteristic blend of the political and the jocular. The catalogue text was by the critic Paulo Venâncio Filho and the exhibition design by the architect Pedro Mendes da Rocha. ​ ​ Instantaneous Enigmas Paulo Venâncio Filho In the work of Cildo Meireles, objects, like his installations, consti- tute a special typology. They were always part of his artistic prac- tice, though very often eclipsed by the large-scale installations. Even so, the objects have their own dimension, on a par with the installations, of which they are generally summaries, soft cores, compact reductions. Historically, the object has been negatively construed—neither sculpture nor painting. However, this initial and sidelining characterization does not take the trouble to define the object for what it is, only for what it is not. With the object there arises a new and specific entity, heteroclitic, polymorphic, hetero- geneous. It has become a category in its own right, albeit one that admits of only brittle definition, constantly changing across time and space, from artist to artist, from whom it demands no special skill or training. It can easily be mistaken for any old thing—having no place of its own, just about anywhere will do. This is the territory in which Cildo’s objects operate. Objects are not fussy about materiality. No manner of material is scorned; all are welcome, possible and plausible. In general, ob- jects are small in size, though they act upon and modify the space they occupy. Left on the floor, stuck to the wall, placed on a table or a pedestal, hung from the ceiling, they don’t really care. They are also products, and so frequently merge into the universe of prod- ucts, even if they are not readymades. In their origin, they are ob- jects of desire: in principle, an object is something to be had, like any other product. As such, they aim to infiltrate the private, sub- jective sphere of the viewer through the closest possible proximity, both visual and tactile. Unitary or composed of parts, the object is an entity in and of itself. Belonging as it does to the ambit of things familiar, useful, ready to hand, the dimension the object acquires is more than just concrete and spatial, as the space it constructs is physical and imaginary, strange and indefinite. It signals a new form of consumption, a still utopian appropriation of things, possibly extendable to all objects, under the auspices of a gratuitous and general belonging. The object opens up to all possibilities, including self-annulment and opposi- tion— Anulação por adição ou oposição (Annulment by Addition or Oppo- sition) is the title of one of Cildo’s objects. It may, indeed, annul itself comically through deformation, as in Rodos (Squeegees). ​ If the spatiality of Cildo’s large installations envelopes us in its sensorial impact, his objects require extreme concentration, as if stuck before an enigma that, if left unresolved, will bar our prog- ress. More than that: we are imprisoned by their latent will to free up some novel, unknown, surprising possibility. It is then that we see that Cildo’s thinking unfolds through and with these objects. He wants to reason with things, with the concrete, everyday, close-to- hand world. He wants to observe it, balk at it, contemplate it into uncanniness. In so doing, bland objects become remarkable, odd, misshapen and displaced. Mutable, deformable, shapeshifting, they wrap themselves in situations, known and unknown relations, all at once. Drawings, for example, can metabolize into object by an ironic stutter of homonyms—Pastel de pastéis (Pastel Pastel). In Value impaired—bills gathered on the ceiling, coins pooled on the floor—a constant leitmotif carries over from countless oth- er works. Nothing is more recurrent in Cildo’s art than bank notes. It’s a sort of type-object in his work, ever-present throughout, as in the now-classic Zero cruzeiro. If the artwork is an asset, then every artwork is, allegorically, currency, potential legal tender. Conflating the work and the bill is to place one inside the other, make art “dis- appear” into cash. The object is, therefore, a sort of instantaneous enigma, a quick-fire schema built out of humdrum things, as in Razão e loucu- ra (Reason and Madness)—a bamboo bow, chain, lock and key—an epigrammatical, economical formulation. While the object certainly contains a dose of insanity, it is wrought of the most precise ratio- nality. In other words, make no mistake: it’s Reason and Madness, not Reason or Madness. Having this infinite variety of objects at his disposal is like hav- ing the world as a set of categories to which the object submits: hu- mor, irony, allegory, critique. The object is the site of innumerable combinatory operations. It comes from a long and illustrious tra- dition that began with Duchamp, among others, and morphed its way through surrealism, constructivism, the non-object, the spe- cial-object, among others. Cildo’s object is a possible combination of exlusionary elements. And yet that is all it is, an object, simple as that, with no trace of any other reality, idea or concept. It is founded in the here and now, and radically so. What these objects reveal is an intense imaginative charge and a precise conceptual limit. We might call them “parascientific”, imaginatively laden and precise in their formulation. They never go beyond the strictly necessary, the poetic of the work is rigorously “controlled”. Cildo’s attention roams about, anti-Duchampsianly; encountering here and there something that catches its attention, but the object never disconnects from, or dissolves in, an idea. And, out of the existing objects, others will be proposed, beyond those that are already there, in the world. It’s the object that does the “proposing”: the wand-like rods in Desaparecimentos (Disap- pearances) suggest an act of magic—which, symbolically, has the power to make things appear and disappear. Naturally, the handker- chief could “vanish” from the cane and reveal the “secret” of the trick. The sequence of disappearance (and reappearance) is cine- matographic, exposed in each of its frames-per-second: beginning, middle, end and back again; the awakening of the object from its inert condition. Cildo’s objects, generally commonplace, workaday things of no apparent value, approach the readymade and threaten tangency, only to veer away, leaving it behind, caught up in their slipstream. One might say they propose to “disappear with” the readymade. When the end of the age of the object, the usual broker between subject and world, finally draws near, these works will remain as testaments to the imaginative potential—increasingly muted in our day—of the things that lie in our midst, near to hand. ​ Texto Cildo

Continue Aldo Bonadei (1906 - 1974) Aldo Cláudio Felipe Bonadei, widely known as Aldo Bonadei (São Paulo June 17th, 1906 — São Paulo, January 16th, 1974) was a Brazilian painter. As a member of the Grupo Santa Helena he was distinguished for his erudition. His varied interests made him develop work in poetry, fashion and theater. Bonadei was culturally important in the 1930s and 1940s, when modern art was being consolidated in Brazil. He was a pioneer of the abstract art in that country. In the end of the 1950s, he worked as costume designer for Nydia Lícia & Sérgio Cardoso company, and in two films by Walter Hugo Khoury.

Continue Milton Dacosta (1915 - 1988) Milton Dacosta was a Brazilian painter who was born in 1915. Their work was featured in several exhibitions at key galleries and museums, including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and the Fortes D'Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo (Galpão) . Milton Dacosta's work has been offered at auction multiple times, with realized prices ranging from $5,247 USD to $171,750 USD, depending on the size and medium of the artwork. Since 2010 the record price for this artist at auction is $171,750 USD for Figura, sold at Christie's New York in 2013. Milton Dacosta is featured in 6th Mercosul Biennial, a piece from the e-flux in 2007. The artist died in 1988.

Continue Maurício Nogueira Lima (1930 - 1999) Mauricio Nogueira Lima’s first exhibition was III Bienal Do Museu De Arte Moderna De São Paulo at Bienal de Sao Paulo in São Paulo in 1955, and the most recent exhibition was Pinta Miami 2017 at Pinta in Miami, FL in 2017. Mauricio Nogueira Lima is mostly exhibited in Brazil, but also had exhibitions in United States, Mexico and elsewhere. Lima has no solo shows but 14 group shows over the last 62 years (for more information, see biography). Lima has also been in 4 art fairs and in 3 biennials. The most important show was IV Bienal Do Museu De Arte Moderna De São Paulo at Bienal de Sao Paulo in São Paulo in 1957. Other important shows were at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid and Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn. Mauricio Nogueira Lima has been exhibited with Lygia Clark and Ivan Serpa. Mauricio Nogueira Lima’s art is in 3 museum collections, at Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (mam) in São Paulo and Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC/USP) in São Paulo among others.

Continue Emiliano Di Cavalcanti (1897 - 1976) Brazilian painter, draughtsman, and writer, born in Rio de Janeiro, a pioneer of modern art in his country. He trained for a career in law, but turned seriously to art after a successful exhibition of his caricatures in São Paulo in 1917. In 1922 he helped to organize the Semana de Arte Moderna in São Paulo, which is regarded as a turning-point in Brazilian culture; it included dance spectacles, poetry readings, and an art exhibition. From 1923 to 1925 he was based in Paris as a correspondent for the newspaper Correio de Manha; during this time he got to know many leading avant-garde artists, including Braque, Cocteau, Léger, Matisse, and Picasso, and he travelled widely in Europe. He returned to Europe in 1938–40. His work draws on a wide range of influences, including Cubism, Fauvism and Picasso's Neoclassicism of the 1920s, which he blended into an extravagantly colourful style, well suited to the high-keyed Brazilian subjects he favoured: sensuous mulatto women, carnival and festival scenes, poor fishermen, and prostitutes were among his favourite themes. His cheerful, conservative brand of modernism and his preference for local subjects won him great popularity in Brazil. He published two volumes of memoirs (1955 and 1964).

Oswaldo Goeldi Cildo Meireles Frans Krajcberg Di Cavalcanti Alfredo Volpi Hélio Oiticica Tarsila do Amaral Tarsila do Amaral Tarsila do Amaral was born in Capivari, in the Brazilian state of SãoPaulo, on September 1, 1886. She was the daughter of José Estanislau do Amaral Filho and Lydia Dias de Aguiar, members of the rural coffee aristocracy of the state. Her childhood was spent mainly in her father’s farms, São Bernardo, located near Capivari, and Santa Teresa do Alto, in the municipality of Itupeva. She would later study at boarding schools in São Paulo and Barcelona, marrying, in 1904, André Teixeira Pinto. She had a daughter with him, Dulce, born on the São Bernardo Farm in 1906. Her engagement with painting commenced after she separated from her first husband. She studied with William Zadig from 1916, continuing her studies with Pedro Alexandrino one year later. In 1920, she settled in Paris, where she attended the Académie Julian. Back in Brazil in June 1922, four months after the Modern Art Week, she came into contact with Mário de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, Anita Malfatti and Menotti Del Picchia.The five would entitle themselves the Grupo dos Cinco [Group of Five]. At the end of the year, she returned to Paris, where she studied with André Lhote, Albert Gleizes and Fernand Léger, whose works she deeply absorbed. Oswald de Andrade left for Europe shortly thereafter, commencing a fruitful intellectual and romantic relationship with her. ​ ​ The exhibition ​ Tarsila do Amaral (b. Capivari, São Paulo, 1886 - d. Sao Paulo, 1973) was a key figure in the Brazilian modernist movement, producing a powerful and innovative oeuvre that spans distinct stages: Pau-Brasil (Brazilwood); the "Anthropophagic" paintings; and her social phase. Two very important paintings that are frequently reproduced in the vast bibliography on the artist form the core of the exhibition: Paisagem com dois porquinhos / Landscape with two little pigs (1929) and Segunda Classe / Second Class (1933). As both belong to private collections, they have rarely been seen in public, so the show is a unique opportunity to savor them both together, first-hand. The exhibition intends to use these two paintings as the lenses through which to take a closer look at the moment of rupture and transformation that was the late 20s, early 30s. The few years that separate one work from the other were deeply transformational in Tarsila’s life and art. With the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange in 1929, she suffered serious financial setbacks caused by plummeting coffee prices on the international market, and found her family ranch seized by creditors. It was the end of the life of luxury she had always known. At the same time, she separated from her husband the poet Oswald de Andrade, with whom she had been married since 1926 and maintained a fruitful intellectual relationship. While Landscape with two little pigs is a significant example from Tarsila’s Pau-Brasil phase, Second Class is one of the most important products of her less numerous socially-minded works. Tarsila was a leading figure in both the renewal of Brazilian artistic language, which she constantly updated with the latest developments from the European vanguards she maintained close contact with, and from which she learned a great deal, and among the first Brazilian artists to engage with the social concerns that marked the 1930s in Brazil and abroad. As Luís Martins points out: “Tarsila turned to social painting and was capturing the 'Brazilian reality' long before any other Brazilian artist, and she did so in such a direct and powerful way.” In addition to the two centerpieces, the show will also feature a publication full of iconographic documentation, a critical bibliography on Tarsila’s work and exhibitions, and texts by Paulo Venancio Filho, Aracy Amaral, Regina Teixeira de Barros, Juan Manuel Bonet and Jorge Schwartz. ​ Click here to access the exhibition's viewing room.

Adriana Varejão Alberto da Veiga Guignard 1896 - 1962 Aldo Bonadei 1906 - 1974 Alfredo Volpi 1896 - 1988 Almir Mavignier 1925 - 2018 Amilcar de Castro 1920 - 2002 Antonio Bandeira 1922 - 1967 Antonio Dias 1944 - 2018 Antonio Henrique Amaral 1935 - 2015 Arthur Luiz Piza Burle Marx 1909 - 1994 Candido Portinari 1903 - 1962 Cicero Dias 1907 - 2003 Cildo Meireles Claudio Tozzi Cruz Diez 1923 - 2019 Dan Flavin 1933 - 1996 Djanira da Motta e Silva 1914 - 1979 Eleonore Koch 1926 - 2018 Eliseu Visconti 1866 - 1944 Emiliano Di Cavalcanti 1897 - 1976 Ernesto De Fiori 1884 - 1945 Ernesto Neto Flávio de Carvalho 1899 - 1973 François Morellet 1926 - 2016