Continue Wesley Duke Lee (1931 - 2010) Grandson of American missionaries and Brazilian merchants of Portuguese descent, Wesley Duke Lee grew up in São Paulo. His training began at the Museo de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) and in 1951 he enrolled at the Parsons School of Design to study graphic arts. In New York, Lee met Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and John Cage, who significantly informed his practice. In 1960 he formed the realismo magico (magic realism) movement in São Paulo, which initiated a return to figurative painting. In 1963 Lee organised one of the first happenings to take place in Brazil titled The Great Spectacle of the Arts in the landmark Bar João Sebastião, a Bossa Nova meeting place for cultural activists. In 1966, alongside Nelson Leirner, Geraldo de Barros and others, he founded the Grupo REX and REX Gallery (1966–7). REX sought to propose an alternative to the existing market system and offered a programme of free exhibitions, as well as a bimonthly bulletin. Trapeze or a Confession 1966 is a key work in Wesley Duke Lee’s oeuvre and was first exhibited at the 33rd Venice Biennale. Inspired by Kurt Schwitters’s Merzhaus, Trapeze or a Confession is an immersive cubic environment constructed of acrylic and wooden panels that represent aspects of human intimacy. The title Trapeze or a Confession reflects two layers of the work’s meaning. ‘Trapeze’ refers to an Italian song entitled Acrobats that inspired the male and female archetypal silhouettes suspended above ground and connected by transparent ropes on the green and yellow acrylic sheets. ‘Confession’ refers to the effect the work has on the viewer. Placed between the two figures, the spectator is cross-examined. The intimate space dissipates inhibitions, leaving the viewer with no choice but to confess his/her secrets. In its original version the work incorporated a sound machine that produced a monotonous and consistent noise that further isolated the viewer’s perception.

Continue Tunga (1952 - 2016) The artistic practice of Tunga (Antônio José de Barros Carvalho e Mello Mourão) moves freely through an array of disciplines, such as sculpture, drawing, performance, installation, poetry and video, transgressing borders not only in the scope of artistic expression but also in relation to other human practices, from science and alchemy to ancestral rites. One of the most powerful and influential artists of his generation, he has developed, over 40 years, an integrated body of work that is characterized by an associative interpenetration - such as mirroring and self-reference - between individual pieces. Organic elements and morphological shapes move, and are fluidly drawn between abstraction and figuration, engulfing themselves in the deeper layers of human sensory experience, ranging from unconscious sexual symbolism to the transformation of matter into spirit. With a degree in architecture from the Santa Úrsula University, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, he founded in the 1970s, alongside the artists Cildo Meireles, Waltercio Caldas and José Resende, the magazine Malasartes and the short-lived journal A Parte do Fogo. He has held solo exhibitions at important institutions such as the Center d'Art et de la Nature, Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire, France (2015); Galeria Millan, São Paulo, Brazil (2004, 2009 and 2010); MoMa PS1, New York, USA (2008); Musée do Louvre, Paris, France (2005); Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, France (2001); Phoenix Art Museum, USA (1998); Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, USA; Bard College – Center for Curatorial Studies, New York, EUA (1997); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, USA; Kanaal Art Foundation, Kortrijk, Belgium; Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (1989); and Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (1974). In 2012, Instituto Inhotim (Minas Gerias, Brazil) inaugurated a second pavilion dedicated to his work. Tunga has participated in numerous group exhibitions and Biennials around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Poland (2017); Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (1981, 1987, 1994, 1998, 2013 and 2018); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain (2001); Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA (2001); Biennale de Lyon, France (2000); Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil (1999); Documenta X, Kassel, Germany (1997); Bienal de la Habana, Cuba (1994); Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA (1993); Ludwig Museum, Köln, Germany (1993); Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA (1993); Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, France (1992); Kanaal Foundation, Belgium; Stedelijk Museum, Netherlands (1989); Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan (1985); and Venice Biennale, Italy (1982). His work is part of important collections such as the Peggy Guggenheim, Venice, Italy; Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, USA; Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), USA; Château la Coste, Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade, France; Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil; Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; Instituto Inhotim, Minas Gerais, Brazil; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Colombia, among others.

Continue Flávio de Carvalho (1899 - 1973) Flávio de Carvalho was a rabble-rousing artist who practiced many mediums, but was best known for his contributions to architecture and early performance art. Carvalho, who studied philosophy, civil engineering, and painting, was a revolutionary architect with Bauhaus influences. His most famous work was A cidade do homem nu, or “the city of the naked man,” a plan for a utopian metropolis; only a few of his designs were realized during his lifetime. Starting 1931, Carvalho staged his first performance pieces, called êxperiéncia, which were almost always provocative and sometimes even sacrilegious, at times even provoking the public to attack him. Carvalho also made figural and portrait paintings in a Futurist style; these too were perceived as too grotesque or deserving of censorship—even provoking the police to shut down some of his exhibitions.

Continue Adriana Varejão Adriana Varejão was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1964. Her paintings, sculptures, installations, and photographs engage with the complex and violent artistic and political history of Brazil. She appropriates stylistic traditions introduced to Brazil as part of the colonial encounter and interrupts their veneer with grotesque punctuations of exposed organs and blood. In her early series Baroque (1987–1992), Varejão explores the ornate style that arrived with the conquistadors. In the series Terra Incognita (1991–2003), she utilized the Dutch, Portuguese, and Chinese pictorial traditions imported in the seventeenth century. With her series Proposal for a Catechesis (1993–99), Varejão began to incorporate the decorative terracotta tiles, or azulejos, which served as a visual manifestation of the Portuguese presence in Brazil beginning in the eighteenth century. Here the vulnerable skin of the canvas and tile are spliced open to reveal the corporeal violence lying beneath the smooth illusionism of the painted surface and, symbolically, the historical narratives. Varejão's paintings became increasingly sculptural, introducing elements that extended beyond the canvas, and she soon transitioned to sculpture and installation. By the time the artist initiated the series Jerked-beef Ruins (2000–04), the decorative, distinctly European tiles gave way to more universal pale blue or white tiles found in public buildings or bathrooms. In these sculptures, the cadaverous contents do not burst from the center as they had in her earlier pieces, but rather lurk hidden within, exposed only at the edges of the smooth facade. In Varejão's recent series of paintings entitled Saunas and Baths (2001–08), an eerie silence and stillness pervades scenes of empty corridors, pools, and stairs composed entirely of tiles.

Continue Wojciech Fangor (1922 - 2015) Fangor's interest in art wasn't hindered by the outbreak of World War II. He studied privately with Tadeusz Pruszkowski and Felicjan Szczęsny Kowarski (1940–1944) and in 1946 he received a diploma in absentia at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw where he was assistant professor between 1953 and 1961. In the absurdity of post-war Poland, Fangor took the expressionist and impressionist styles of the French masters early on in his career. When in 1949 the authorities instated realism as the only legitimate form of art, Fangor began painting his signature 'characters' of contemporary Polish society. His transition from impressionism and abstraction into realism was relatively smooth, his work rather different from the typical image of Socio-realism of the time.

Continue Alexander Calder (1898 - 1976) Alexander Calder is perhaps best known for his large, colorful sculpture, which incorporates elements of humor and chance into uniquely engineered structures. Calder was born outside of Philadelphia to a successful, artistic family. His father and grandfather--both named Alexander Calder--were distinguished sculptors and his mother was a portrait painter. Although he initially studied mechanical engineering, receiving a degree from Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New Jersey, he eventually enrolled in the Art Students League in New York City (1923-1926) and studied painting with John Sloan and George Luks, among others. While working as a graphic artist on assignment at the zoo and circus, Calder discovered his facility for sketching animals. This subject would become a lifelong passion. In 1927 Calder went to Paris. Initially he created small, movable wood and wire figures, which he then assembled into a miniature circus, complete with balancing acrobats and a roaring lion. The popularity of "Calder's circus" soon brought him in contact with other artistic innovators. In the early 1930s, inspired by the color and composition of Piet Mondrian's work, Calder created his breakthrough mobiles. At first these abstract sculptures were motorized; later Calder modified his design to allow free-floating movement, powered only by air currents. These signature works incorporated Calder's interests in physics, astronomy, and kinetics, and above all, his sense of play. By 1933 Calder had returned to the United States, where his abstract-organic sculpture, both mobile and stationary, attracted considerable attention and acclaim. He settled in Connecticut and continued to produce innovative works on both a large and small scale. After 1950 Calder spent part of each year in France. In addition to the monumental sculptures that can be seen in the United States and Europe, Calder applied his whimsical and lyrical sense of design to media as diverse as metal jewelry and theater sets.

Oswaldo Goeldi Cildo Meireles Frans Krajcberg Di Cavalcanti Alfredo Volpi Hélio Oiticica Tarsila do Amaral Hélio Oiticica Hélio Oiticica was a Brazilian performance artist, painter and sculptor. His work stands out for its experimentalism and inventiveness in its constant attempt to blend art and life. His experiments, which require active public participation, are largely accompanied by theoretical expositions, often in the form of texts, commentaries and poems. ​ HO ​ In 2006, the gallery held a solo Oiticica exhibition of ten “Parangole Capes” created in 1979 for the Recife Festival. Rather than simply present the static objects, the scenography by Daniela Thomas allowed the visitor to see them in use: a video shot on a closed São Paulo overpass showed members of the Vai-Vai carnival club dancing clothed in the capes. ​ In parallel with the exhibition, the gallery launched a catalogue put together by Carlito Carvalhosa with photographs by Gui Paganini and a previously unpublished text by the British critic Guy Brett. “Drawing inspiration from the aristocratic and grassroots alike, the ‘Parangolé Capes’ are, at once, cloaks and rags”, he wrote. ​ Click here for the texts by Paulo Bruscky and Guy Brett. Textos Helio Hélio Oiticica and the Parangolé Capes in Recife Paulo Bruscky In the middle of June, 1979, Hélio Oiticica came to Recife at my invitation to take part in the Second Winter Festival of the Catholic University of Pernambuco. Oiticica gave a lecture illustrated with slides about his personal development and his art. In addition he organized an event with ten parangolé capes in the courtyard of the university and in the Pátio São Pedro in the city centre. I was standing beside him and was able to witness how happy he was to see the public putting on his parangolé capes and dancing in them, for the first time in Brazil. Similar events took place in London in 1969 and in Pamplona in 1972. These were unforgettable weeks when we talked at length about art and his life and work. On one occasion Jomard Muniz de Britto, Alm Andrade, Jota Medeiros, Oiticica and I sat till daybreak exchanging ideas in a bar on the hill of Conceição. Hélio told me that one of his sources of inspiration for the parangolé cape project occurred when he was on a bus passing through the Botanical Garden and saw a garbage collector take a large plastic sack, make two holes in it for his arms and one for his head and put it on to protect himself from the rain. His letter of 12.07.1979, published in this catalogue, sheds light on his conception of the parangolés. Oiticica asked me to take note of the first people to use the parangolés, so this could be preserved in his records. At about this time I got him a ticket to travel from Recife to Manaus, where he visited his brother César before returning to Rio de Janeiro. ​ The ten parangolés made in Recife were exhibited and worn in 1981 in Porto Alegre in the Espaço NO, by request of Vera Chaves Barcellos. In June 1986, as Coordinator of the Cultural Foundation of the City of Recife, I inaugurated the Multimedia Auditorium Hélio Oiticica in the Aloísio Magalhães Metropolitan Art Gallery. The presentation of Hélio Oiticica’s parangolé capes is of the utmost importance because this was one of the few works that he produced in Brazil after his long period in New York and shortly before he died in Rio de Janeiro in March 1980, eight months after the event. Capas d'Agora (Capes 'o Now) Guy Brett ​ Every text on Hélio Oiticica should somehow try to work its way back from the objects which survive him, which are now described, exhibited, catalogued, bought and sold as his ‘work’, to the live act that he conceived these objects for. The objects associated with Oiticica’s notion of Parangolé took the form of banners, or flags, or capes, or tents. He knew that and welcomed the association, while pointing out that this was not the crux of the matter. He called them ‘trans-objects’, and when they were put to use by living people they became: “no longer the objects as they were previously known, but a relation which transforms what was known into new knowledge and what still remains to be learnt, a dimension we would call the unknown, the remnant which remains open to the imagination which re-creates itself upon the work”. And he continued in characteristically paradoxical style: “what emerges in the continuous spectator-work contact will therefore be conditioned by the character of the work, itself unconditioned. Hence, there is a conditioned-unconditioned relationship in the continuous apprehension of the work”. These statements come from Oiticica’s earliest writing specifically on the subject of Parangolé. Later, when he was in New York, he returned to the theme in the more compressed, suggestive and graphic texts he produced in that city. This was a textual means of trying to take the open, living, ‘embodying’ role of the object beyond contradiction and antithesis: CAPEcondition ( concrete extension of wearing-embodying ) MADE FOR WEARING (no longer as search for sensory non-conditionings erecting new experimentalism) ​ CAPES MADE ON THE BODY were/belonged as an extreme state to the first premises of experimentalism of the sensorial unconditioned: the body moving over itself; construct-embody empty cocoon loose extension which re-embodies itself whenever worn CAPES o’now: garment-concretions whose ‘little totality’ void is made for wearing that which is sensory object but cannot be reduced to such: the previous contradiction non-conditioned / “naturalism of doing” does not appear: explorable units without thought-out foreknowledge more open without concern for ‘corporal significations’. ‘sensory non-conditionings’, etc. ​ ​ ​ ​ Here he mentions ‘capes made on the body’. As we know from Oiticica’s letter to Paulo Bruscky of 12th July 1979, accepting Bruscky’s invitation to stage a Parangolé event in Recife, the structures built on the body would be improvised by the participants themselves out of a plain coloured length of cloth which they would fix together with pins. This was to be the third time he had experimented with made-on-the-body capes, the other two being in Sussex, England, in 1969 and Pamplona, Spain in 1972 (hence his joke in the letter about the adaptability of his idea to totally different environments!). Made-on-the-body capes, therefore, remained a constant through years in which the character of the Parangolé cape changed considerably. These changes can perhaps be grouped in four episodes. First, the pure colour capes of the early 1960s as an extraordinary leap from Oiticica’s painterly experiments in “manifestations of colour in environmental space” - Relevo Espacial, Núcleo (Spatial Relief, Nucleus, etc.) - to a new space centered on the body in motion. Soon after came the socio-political, activist, poetic capes of the mid-1960s, introducing words as well as a wider range of materials, epitomised in the title (and painted words) of one of the capes made in collaboration with Nildo of Mangueira: Cape 11, Incorporo a Revolta (“I Embody Revolt”), 1967. This series ranged from the simple (such as Cape 8, Capa da Liberdade, 1966, made with Rubens Gerchman, a few pieces of cloth hung from the shoulder to reveal and hide the word ‘liberty’ in the irrepressible exuberance of the participant’s dance); to the complex (capes paying homage to friends, and evoking states of living, more individual and elaborate both as regards their physical structure and their metaphorical meanings). The dialectic of wearing/watching in the Parangolé event also developed. Next came capes that emerged during Oiticica’s years in New York: starker, more abstract pieces that both reflect a harsher urban environment and generate a play between naked body, transparency, veiling and void (Cape 23, M’Way Ke, 1972, or the wrapping of Waly Salomão’s scarlet-painted face in Parangolé de Cabeça (Head Parangolé, 1976). Voids, to be animated by the individual participant’s imagination, accompany Oiticica’s theory of the Supra-sensorial, itself an effort to counter the consumption of his work merely at the level of imagery that he saw as a feature of the reception of his Tropicália ensemble of 1967. Finally there is the body-covering made in the last year of his life, which he called Bólide Poema A Tua na Minha (Poem Bolide Yours by Mine), 1980, which I will return to in a moment. Oiticica described his Made on the Body experiment as “very simple”. Nevertheless his letter to Bruscky is full of precise instructions and is wholly characteristic of his attention to detail. Out of the plain 3-meter length of fabric “each person must build on the body a structure, uniting the edges and extremes with safety pins”. He stresses that each cape should be removable without disturbing the pins, so that it can be handed on to someone else, who will ‘wear’ it and activate it in a completely different way. This seems to be the essence of the proposition. Oiticica emphasises the desirability of participation by a heterogeneous public, underlining the word and ending the sentence: “OK?” It is a perfect example of what he meant by “the continuous spectator-work contact … conditioned by the character of the work, itself unconditioned”; and what Mário Pedrosa must have been referring to when he described work of the Brazilian avant-garde in the 1960s as “the experimental exercise of freedom”. We must be greatly indebted to Paulo Bruscky for inviting Hélio Oiticica to Recife and, though it was not strictly speaking essential to the concept, carefully preserving the Parangolé capes made during the event. ​ I was not in Pamplona when Oiticica was there, and I somehow missed the made-on-the-body event in Britain - among other things this latter must have pre-empted the British punks’ later cult of the safety-pin!. The role of the safety-pin is crucial. With complete economy it produces the articulated cocoon out of the flat plane. There seems to be a correspondence between these improvised capes and another strand in Oiticica’s late work, the return to certain constructivist principles in the maquettes for new architectural Penetrables to be called Invenção da Cor (Invention of Colour), 1977-78. The modulations of light and space created by sliding panels and opening and closing sides of cubes correspond to the body’s movement in Parangolé. He called the architectural models Invenção da Cor “because it is no longer structure-colour-painting, or sculptural-architectural application of colours: it is colour in suspension: we rest in colour”. ​ The two strands echo in one another, and confirm Oiticica’s pursuit of liberty across every convention and category that frames our sensory being-in-the- world, from the hand-held, to the bodily, to the shelter, to the environmental whole. Such a search can be recognised in terms that he himself in his early writings ascribed to Mondrian, and to Mondrian’s dream of the dissolution of art into life. It would be “neither the mural nor applied art, but something expressive, which would be like the ‘beauty of life’, something he could not define because it did not yet exist”. ​ Yet this could never be an unambiguous, positivist agenda. The precarious Parangolé, as something ‘made on the body’, must have reached deep into Oiticica’s imaginative core. There it became one of the vehicles for a meditation on the unavoidable paradox of experience. There is only a fine line between all opposed pairs. In its simplest form the Parangolé itself was a kind of membrane, a veil, which rests on the interface between the living body and the sense of sight. To see is primordially a dialectic of experiences each contradicting the other, a continuous play between the revealing and the veiling of the world, of reality. So many of Oiticica’s propositions seem to be two opposite things at once. Drawing on both aristocratic and popular inspirations, the Parangolé Capes are simultaneously robes and rags. Referring to form, they are logically structured and spontaneously wild. In terms of universal experience, they become a means of outward-turning declaration and inward-turning self-absorption, freedom and entrapment. At some further level they may also suggest the beginning and end of life, simultaneously the amniotic sac of the unborn baby and the winding sheet of the departed. It is almost uncanny the way A Tua na Minha, a beautiful encapsulation of reciprocity made in the last year of his life, was both a ‘warm-up for Carnival’, potentially full of life, “a sensuality measurer”, he called it, “to test people’s sensuality”, and at the same time, in its dark veiling, can hardly help being seen as a shroud, a premonition of his untimely death.

Continue Margaret Mee (1909 - 1988) Margaret Mee was a petite English lady and botanical artist who produced hundreds of botanical paintings as a result of her exploration of the flora of Brazil, along the River Amazon and in the Amazon rainforest. She follows in the traditions of the great lady botanical artist explorers! In 1952, age 42 she left England to go and live in the Amazon. Age 47 she started to explore the Amazon where she studied and painted the plants and flowers of the Amazon rainforest for the next 30 years. She also found and recorded new plants which are now named after her.

Continue François Morellet (1926 - 2016) François Morellet (*1926 in Cholet in France) is widely recognized as one of the important systemic abstract artists, working with strict arrangement systems, such as interfering grids, sequences of structures, or the principle of contingency. François Morellet worked in his father's business between 1948 and 1975. He taught himself to paint but also took lessons from a painter. His early landscapes, portraits and still lifes were executed in pastose brushwork in a subdued palette but they soon gave way to painting distinguished by stylized pictorial elements. By 1950 François Morellet was styling himself an "abstract painter". That year Morellet had his first one-man show at the Galerie Creuze in Paris. In the mid-1950s François Morellet was preoccupied with configuring the picture field as an infinite structure reaching beyond the confines of the picture itself. In so doing, François Morellet eliminated the all-over technique of a Jackson Pollock from his range since Morellet based each work on principles and systems established in advance. François Morellet was in fact more interested in method than in the finished painting. Determined to find a new medium of expression, François Morellet used neon from 1963 as his material of choice. What interested Morellet in neon tubing was its specific material properties: its luminosity, the way it could be made to shut on and off automatically and the fact that it was manufactured. From 1968 François Morellet became interested in architecture and space.

Continue Eliseu Visconti (1866 - 1944) Eliseu Visconti, born Eliseo d'Angelo Visconti (Italy, 1866 - Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1944) is a painter, cartoonist and Brazilian teacher. He is considered the most important impressionist painter of Brazil. He enters in 1884 the Liceu Imperial de Artes e Ofícios do Rio de Janeiro, where he has as master Victor Meireles. Parallel to his studies in the Liceu, he fits in the Imperial Academia de Belas Artes, working his art with Victor Meireles, Henrique Bernardelli, Rodolfo Amoedo and Jose Maria de Medeiros. During his stay in the Academia (during which he received a gold medal in 1888), he took an active part in movements which aimed at the renewal of teaching methods, and amongst others those which created the Ateliê Livre , with the assistance of João Zeferino of Costa, Rodolfo Amoêdo, Henrique and Rodolpho Bernardelli. Visconti won an award from the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes in 1892, and so entered the École de Beaux-Arts de Paris the following year, where he obtains excellent classification in the admission exam. He also attends the Académie Julian and the École of Decorative Arts, where he is pupil of Eugene Grasset. One sees it in the living rooms of the National company of the Art schools and the Société of the French Artists; he presents to the Exposition Universelle 1900 tables Gioventú and Oréadas , for which he receives a silver medal. Going back to Brazil, Visconti there carries out important exhibitions, in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, and obtains the first classification in a contest for the making of postal stamps for the Brazilian Casa da Moeda. He is the initiator of the art nouveau in Brazil. He returns once to Europe, where he presents to the Living room of Paris of 1905, the portrait of the artist Nicolina Vaz de Assis. In this same year, he is invited to carry out various decorative works of painting for the Theatro Municipal of Rio de Janeiro. He works from his studio in Paris. In June 1906, he is selected to replace Henrique Bernardelli in the teaching of painting at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes, the successor of old Imperial Academia, a position which he will occupy only the following year, after his return to Brazil. Among his disciples, during this period as a teacher which lasted until 1913, were the painters Marques Junior and Henrique Cavalleiro. Go back to this time decorative works which Visconti executed for the Biblioteca Nacional (Rio de Janeiro) and the gold medal received in the International Exhibition of Saint-Louis (Saint Louis World's Fair), in 1904, for the table "Recompensa de São Sebastião" (see external links). The museum of Santiago of the Chile acquires in 1912 one of his works, "Sonho Místico" (Mystical Dream). In 1913, Eliseu Visconti returns to Europe in order to carry out new work in decorative matter for the "foyer" of the Theatro Municipal do Rio de Janeiro, and devotes himself to it until 1916. However, it will have to await the end of the First World War to reach Brazilian grounds. In 1922, with the triptych Lar, he receives the Medal of Honor in the Exposition of the Centenary of Independence (Rio de Janeiro), and carries out the following year the decoration of the hall of the municipal council of the old federal district and, in 1924, the panel concerning the signature of the first Republican Constitution, for the old federal Room, also in Rio de Janeiro.

Continue Victor Brecheret (1984 - 1955) Brazilian sculptor, born in Viterbo (Italy), or in Sao Paulo, according to others, in 1894, and died in São Paulo on December 17, 1955. He/She was instrumental in the Brazilian modernism, forming the background of the "week of the 22", landmark historical in the impulse of modernism in his country. Unlike many other Brazilian Modernists, Brecheret was of humble origin. Orphaned of mother, arrived in Sao Paulo with his maternal uncles. He/She worked in a shoe store during the day, to attend the evening classes of the Lyceum of Arts and crafts of São Paulo. With great economic sacrifice, his uncle sent him to Rome in 1913, but due to their poor training, it was not admitted at the Academy of fine arts. Rather, during those years he/she was received as a disciple of Arturo Dazzi, the most famous Italian sculptor of the time. In Rome, he/she opened his first workshop in 1915, winning first prize in the exhibition of the "Amatori and together", with the awakening sculpture. Returned to Brazil in 1919, it was discovered by young modernist, that ecstatic with his sculptures, they became a polarizing of the group element. In this environment, he/she made the first model of the monument to the flags. In 1920, he/she presented the House Byington, his sculpture Eve, acquired by the Prefecture of São Paulo. In 1921, he/she received a bag of five studies to expand his training in Paris. In this city he/she remained nearly 15 years, with sporadic trips to Brazil to exhibit their works. There he/she came into contact with great artists such as Fernand Léger, Picasso, Archipenko, or the Brazilian Tarsila do Amaral, Vicente do Rego Monteiro and Antônio Gomide. Also in Paris his work accused the influence of Art Déco, which marked him from 1925. Become an important artist in the French capital, he/she received the title of Knight of the Legion of Honor, and his work group (1932), was acquired by the Jeu de Paume Museum. In the Decade of 1930, he/she participated in the artistic life of Brazil, as a founder of the modern art Pro society (SPAM), and in the halls of may (1937, 1938, and 1939). From the years of 1940, he/she joined his national and indigenous motifs in more and more organic and essential forms. Brecheret participated in the XXV and XXVI Binenales di Venezia (1950-1952), and the first biennial of São Paulo, receiving the award for best national sculptor in 1951. His work is present in public, decorative and funerary monuments of facades, as the monument to the flags, which today is one of the symbols of the city of São Paulo. Some of his most notable works are: Christ and stations of the cross, in the chapel of the Hospital of clinics of São Paulo; Facade and Interior of the Jockey Club de São Paulo; fresh from three Graces and San Francisco, in Osasco. Paulo), etc.