Continue Ione Saldanha (1921 - 2001) Ione Saldanha was a visual artist. Ione Saldanha was born in 1921 and died in 2001. Also born in 1921 and of this same generation are Armando Palamaro, Eric Leaper, Hans Georg Lenzen, Kyohei Fujita, and Roy Moyer. Born in 1921, Ione Saldanha's creative work was predominantly inspired by the 1930s. The period of the 1930s is characterised by the clashing of many political ideologies, including Marxist Socialism, Capitalist Democracy, and the Totalitarianism of both Communism and Fascism. Surrealism continued to dominate in Europe, and had influence internationally. Artists such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Riviera in Mexico, worked to integrate the ideas posed by Surrealism into their revolutionary political philosophies, developing a new kind of magic realism. In the Soviet Union, Stalin’s government needed urgent funds to implement the rapid industrialisation demanded by the first Five Year Plan. It initiated a secret strategy to sell off treasures from the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad (St. Petersburg), including a preliminary list of two hundred and fifty priceless paintings by the Old Masters, many which found their way to the collection of Andrew Mellon via the New York based art dealing company, Knoedler. Artistic output in the United States was heavily impacted at the time by the Great Depression, and a number of artists took to focusing on ideas of humbleness and the ordinary man. For the first time in US history, artists began to explore into political subjects and endeavoured to use their art to impact society. Topics such as poverty, lack of affordable housing, anti-lynching, anti-fascism, and workers' strikes were prevalent in many artists’ work.

Continue Vicente do Rego Monteiro (1899 - 1970) Brazilian artist born in 1899 in a middle-class family of artists in Recife (Pernambuco). In 1911 he/she moved to Paris to study at the Julien Academy. In 1913 he/she exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants. In 1914 he/she returned to Brazil and is interested in music and folk dances. Between 1919 and 1921 he/she exhibited in Recife, Sao Paulo and Rio; the works of these exhibitions are watercolors and drawings on indigenous issues. Between 1921 and 1930 he/she lives again in Paris, working with the prestigious L' l'effort Moderne of Léonce Rosenberg Gallery, which brings together the Group of purists led by Ozenfant. Towards the middle of the Decade, he/she painted compositions with figures primitivist stylized and linked, so the painting as a whole was seen as a relief is shallow; the paintings are almost monochrome, influenced by the Art Deco style; their influences are various (futurism, Cubism, Japanese prints, Brazilian Baroque and especially the art of the Indians of the Marajó island). His work focuses on religious issues and participates in several salons des Indépendants and the Tuileries Gardens. In 1923 he/she published légendes, croyances et talismans des L'Amazon indians and designs, during the following years, a theatrical adaptation of this work. In 1930 his work is present in the Premiere exhibition of the artistes latin-americans, Torres-García organized in Zack's Paris Gallery. This same year returns to Brazil the first exhibition in that country of the school of Paris painting. He/She returned to Recife in 1932 and its House becomes the center of the intellectual life of the city. During the forty-fifty years he/she wrote poetry. Between 1946 and 1957, he/she lives again in Paris. On his return to Brazil he/she was named Professor of the Federal University of Pernambuco. Between 1965 and 1968 he/she teaches at the Central Institute of Brasilia.Muere Arts in Recife in 1970. The following year the Museum of art contemporary of the University of São Paulo dedicates a major exhibition retrospective.

Continue Amilcar de Castro (1920 - 2002) A sculptor, engraver, draughtsman, lay out designer, set designer and lecturer. Moved with his family to Belo Horizonte in 1935, studying at the Law Faculty of theFederal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) between 1941 and 1945. From 1944onwards, he attended the open course in drawing and painting with Guignard (1896 - 1962), at the School of Fine Arts of BeloHorizonte, studying figurative sculpture with Franz Weissmann (1911 - 2005). At the end of the 1940s, he took up a series of political appointments that he soon abandoned, together with his career as a lawyer. In parallel, his work made the transition from drawing to three-dimensions. In 1952, he moved to Rio de Janeiro, working as a layout designer for various publications, most notably redesigning the daily, Jornal do Brasil. Under the influence of artistMax Bill, he developed his first concrete sculptures, which were exhibited at the 2nd São Paulo Biennial, in 1953. In 1959, after participating in the exhibition of the concrete group inRio de Janeiro, he signed the “ Neo Concrete Manifesto”. The following year, he participated in the International Exhibition of Concrete Art, in Zurich,organized by his ex-professor Max Bill. In 1968, he went to the United States on a scholarship from theGuggenheim Memorial Foundation and as part of an award (a ticket abroad) from the 1967 National Salon of Modern Art. Upon returning to Brazil, in1971, he settled in Belo Horizonte, becoming a lecturer in composition and sculpture at the Escola Guignard, where he worked until 1977, also as its director. In the 1970s and 80s, he lectured at the Federal University of MinasGerais (UFMG) Faculty of Fine Arts, retiring from teaching in 1990 to dedicate himself exclusively to his art.

Continue Rubem Valentim (1922 - 1991) Rubem Valentim’s career as a painter began in the late 1940s. His production combines several sources that are part of the Brazilian cultural legacy: popular traditions from the ceramic production of the Northeast, the modernist propositions from the Southeast and the idea of cultural anthropophagy. In his work, the formal development of constructivist ideas is recreated using Brazilian points of reference, both in formal and historical-political terms. Valentim’s works are structurally organized and composed of abstract signs made from horizontal and vertical lines, circles, cubes and arrows. These elements are geometric reductions of Orixá, or deities, from the Afro-Brazilian religions Candomblé and Umbanda. These religions were originally brought to the Americas by enslaved Yoruba peoples from West and Central Africa. Once in Brazil, Candomblé and Umbanda developed further from the presence of indigenous groups and the influence of the Roman Catholic Church installed in Brazil by Portuguese colonizers. Alongside his notion of pictorial space and chromatic investigations, Valentims’ work opens up to a myriad of possibilities. His chromatic study generates a new language – a new ‘signography’ –, whose iconography is revealed both to those that are familiar and not familiar with the Afro-Brazilian religious references he uses. The semiology present in his production proposes the union of the sacred and the Cartesian, conjuring spiritual concerns almost mathematically.

Continue Sergio Camargo (1930 - 1990) Sérgio de Camargo was a Brazilian sculptor of the 20th century who spent much of his life in Paris. He is best known for his monochromatic, geometric sculptures which synthesize the approaches and aesthetics of Constructivism, Minimalism, and early Cubism. Although the texture of many of his works highlight the material used such as wood and marble, they are often smooth and purposefully finished on the surface, in order to use volume and line to investigate space, objecthood and production. Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1930, de Camargo studied at the Academia Altamira in Buenos Aires under the avant-garde painter Emilio Pettoruti, and Lucio Fontana, the founder of Spatialism. He moved to Paris in 1948 where he initially stayed for five years, developing a balanced but impassioned education across disciplines and institutions; he studied philosophy at La Sorbonne under Gaston Bachelard, fine arts at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and upon a second trip to Paris in 1961, sociology at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. His work was significantly influenced by the major figures of the Parisian avant-garde with whom he interacted including Jean Arp, Constantin Brancusi, and Henri Laurens. He joined the Group de Recherche d’Art Visual, which experimented with kinetic art, and began his Relief series of sculptures that exude a sense of movement despite their static geometric forms that seem to jet forth in unison. After winning the International Sculpture Prize at the Paris Biennale of 1963, he returned to Brazil, where he incorporated Brazilian Constructivist aesthetics and enjoyed domestic and international success. He was commissioned for a monumental wall sculpture for Oscar Niemeyer’s Foreign Ministry in 1965, won a gold medal at the 1965 Sao Paulo Biennale, and participated in the 1966 Venice Biennale and 1968 Documenta in Kassel. His works can be found at the Tate Gallery, the Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art and many other major institutions.

Continue Ubi Bava (1915 - 1988) Ubi Bava was born in 1915 and was predominantly influenced by the 1930s. Throughout the 1930s, many political ideologies such as Marxist Socialism, Capitalist Democracy, and the Totalitarianism of both Communism and Fascism were engaged in struggles for power, and epitomised the political atmosphere of the period. n Europe, Surrealism continued to be prominent, and had grown to have influence worldwide. Leading artists took the ideas posed by Surrealism and incorporated them into their radical political ideologies, creating a new kind of magic realism. This was epitomised in the work of artists such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Riviera in Mexico.

Continue Antonio Bandeira (1922 - 1967) Born in Fortaleza on May 26, 1922, Antonio Bandeira tread an uncommon artistic path in the Brazilian art scene. An independent artist amidst the local influence of his time – even though he was extremely active in his social context – he did not seek the stylistic and geographic regionalisms that sometimes fueled the artists of his generation. He remained at the fringe of schools and styles, never lending his name to the declarations of aesthetic faith so much in fashion at that moment. Demanding and methodical, defined by his peers as a serious, laconic artist with a “monastic obstinacy,” he worked diligently throughout his life, leaving a production that is surprising not only for its quality and sensibility, but also for the sheer quantity of artworks. He moreover dedicated special attention to his own persona, reinforcing myths and narratives about his biography and cultivating his image, thus creating a personal image that often sparked interest in his work. Apparently abstract splatters, blotches, weaves, colors and lines effectively imprint, in the words of the artist, “landscapes, seascapes, trees, seaports, cities, in short, travel notes. I begin with realism and then prune away the branches until arriving at the point that my sensibility demands. […] Nature always was, and will be, my storehouse.” This happy commitment with life drove him to approach and assimilate the international language of abstract art. As summarized by Ferreira Gullar, Bandeira “made use of the possibilities of the new language to express his loving relationship with the reality he was living and the reality that he had lived.” The present show features a selection of about 70 artworks – canvases, gouaches and watercolors – from different phases of his artistic production, spanning from his first figurative paintings to the large canvases of dense weaves and drippings in his last years, and has its origin in the show Antonio Bandeira: um abstracionista amigo da vida, held at Espaço Cultural Unifor, Fortaleza, from August through December, 2017.

Oswaldo Goeldi Cildo Meireles Frans Krajcberg Di Cavalcanti Alfredo Volpi Hélio Oiticica Tarsila do Amaral Di Cavalcanti Emiliano Augusto Cavalcanti de Albuquerque Melo, best known as Di Cavalcanti, was a Brazilian modernist painter, draughtsman, illustrator, muralist and caricaturist. Given its vibrant colors, sinuous forms and typically Brazilian themes, such as carnival, mulatas, and other tropical motifs, his oeuvre went a long way toward setting Brazilian art apart from other artistic movements of the time. Alongside Anita Malfatti, Tarsila do Amaral and other major names, Di Cavalcanti is considered one of the most illustrious representatives of Brazilian modernism. ​ The Exhibition ​ The exhibition showed nine works Di Cavalcanti produced between the 1920s and 40s, all handpicked by Kuczynski over the course of three years combing private collections. While all the chosen works pertain to the most significant period of the painter’s career, which pretty much began with the famous Modern Art Week in São Paulo in 1922, some of them had never been exhibited in public before. The oil painting “Descanso dos Pescadores” (Fishermen at Rest), which the artist gifted to the novelist José Lins do Rego, is a case in point, as was “Bordel” (Brothel), pastel on card, which stands out for its geometric forms. The watercolor “Poeta com Flor” (Poet with Flower), produced as an illustration for an Oswald de Andrade poem published in a magazine, remains something of a mystery. The scenography was by the architect Pedro Mendes da Rocha and the catalogue presentation by the poet Ferreira Gullar. ​ ​ Di Cavalcanti, Brazilian Painter ​ Ferreira Gullar Emiliano Di Cavalcanti was one of the masterminds of the Modern Art Week of 1922 (he created the title). Still very young at the time, it is true that he had not yet developed his own pictorial language and was showing only the first hints of the imaginary universe he would leave to us in his strikingly original paintings. Indeed, what really mattered to the young modernists was to break from the past so that they could be free to create Brazil’s new art, a dream they nurtured with boundless enthusiasm. As they saw it, the nation they had inherited was still the expression of cultural dependence and colonialism, represented by artistic academicism, and they had to liberate themselves from it. At that stage, certain painters, such as Eliseu Visconti, had already stepped timidly away from academic art and towards Impressionism or Symbolism. But these were languages that had also run their course and been repelled by the new European vanguards inspiring rebellion in our young artists. Di Cavalcanti’s originality did not blossom overnight, and his early paintings displayed echoes of primitivism and Cubism, especially Picasso. However, beneath all that, if we compare those initial outings with the work of other modernist painters, we see the presence of a different thematic, one infused with the flavour and sensuality of Rio. In his search for a language of his own, Di Cavalcanti embraced a reinvention of the Brazilian spirit that came to characterize our modernism, which strove for an identification with our country and its culture over and above the essentially aesthetic concerns of the European movement. One of the fundaments of the early 20th-century European vanguards was their fascination with the wild side of life, whether internal or external. For the Europeans, it was that wildness art needed to express. In Brazil, where the prevailing art was the expression of the culture of the social and cultural elite, the pursuit was to rediscover that primitive Brazil, which was wild too, but also innocent. Instead of descending into the subconscious like the expressionists, our modernists turned to that forsaken Brazil that predated industrialization. And that’s where Di Cavalcanti’s painting differs from that of his fellow artistic revolutionaries, as it speaks of the urban and suburban Brazil of that time and of the search for a mestizo Brazilian woman as the expression of a new concept of beauty that countered that of the sophisticated white ladies of academic art. Di discovered a new Venus: mulatto, thick-lipped, large-breasted and wide-hipped. It was a discovery that fed his painting for many years and became something of a trademark. He became known as the “painter of mulatas”, which was true, but also somewhat anecdotal, a superficial vision that missed the main point: his choice of the mulatto woman as a theme responded to both an erotic identification and a need to manifest his refusal to conform to the established standards of feminine beauty. So he recreated the figure of this quintessentially Brazilian woman and transformed her into a painterly-thematic reference of modern Brazilian iconography. At the same time as he beat a path of his own, Di was turning it into the expression of a new conception of feminine beauty, one that not only replaced the artistic canons of the past, but bestowed a new social value upon the mestizo woman as the inspiration for a simple, sensual love. That’s what made Di Cavalcanti the poet-painter of this erotic muse of the people. However, it is also true that this feminine figure is more than just a painterly sex symbol, and is not the only theme in his work. It would be no exaggeration to say that no less important as pictorial creations and artistic expressions were his landscapes and still lifes, which he conceived and crafted with the same dedication and artistic quality. Perhaps many admirers of Di’s art, fascinated by his depictions of women, have not regarded the beauty of his other, less obvious works with the same attention. But the truth is, if one has the opportunity to appreciate the various phases of his landscape paintings, it becomes crystal clear just what a consistent, vigorous and imaginative painter he was. But not only that. It is also important to mention one further and fundamental quality of his art: its continued relevance; the novel and intensely present power it retains, as a gimmickless pictorial expression grounded in the essential qualities of painting. ​

Continue Jean Arp (1886 - 1966) Jean Arp or Hans Arp was a French artist who was active in several fields but is principally famous as one of the greatest of abstract sculptors. Born in Strasbourg in 1886, Arp left the École des Arts et Métiers in 1904 for Paris where he published his poetry for the first time. From 1905 to 1907, Arp studied at the Kunstschule, Weimar, Germany and in 1908 went back to Paris, where he attended the Académie Julian. In 1915, in collaboration with his future wife Sophie Taeuber, he experimented with collages and cut-paper reliefs, as in Square arranged according to the laws of chance (1916-17, New York, MOMA). He was involved in 1916 in the formation of the original Dada group in Zurich, and turned in the following year from geometric abstract painting to a more formal language which he used in drawings, woodcuts and wooden relief constructions painted in bright colours, such as Navel, shirt and head (1926, Basel, Kunstmuseum). In 1920, along with Max Ernst, and the social activist Alfred Grünwald, he set up the Cologne Dada group. However, in 1925 his work also appeared in the first exhibition of the surrealist group at the Galérie Pierre in Paris. In 1931, he broke with the Surrealist movement to found Abstraction-Création, working with the Paris-based group Abstraction-Création and the periodical, Transition. During the 1930s, the artist produced several small works made of multiple elements that the viewer could pick up, separate, and rearrange into new configurations. In 1942, he fled from his home in Paris to escape German occupation and lived in Switzerland until his death in 1966.

Continue Leon Ferrari (1920 - 2013) León Ferrari is one of the most renowned Latin American artists worldwide, acclaimed at the 2007 Venice Biennale, for which he received the Golden Lion Award in recognition of his artistic oeuvre that, until the end of his life, motivated him to challenge the world we live in. In his artistic practice, he makes use of different languages, such as sculpture, drawing, writing, collage, assemblage, installation and video. This heterogeneous set of practices integrates themes that reveal both his researcher and activist character as the aesthetic investigation of language, the questioning of the Western world, power and normatization that dictates the values of Religion, Art, Justice and the State, the reverence for women and eroticism, and the depiction of violence. The repetition, the irony, and the literality are also resources of his poetics, recognized since his early works. In the 1960s, the drawings and sculptures of Ferrari are permeated, in particular, by the ethical questioning of religion and the denunciation against Imperialism. In 1976, a military coup forced the artist and his family to leave Buenos Aires, moving to São Paulo, where they remained until the 1990s. During his stay in Brazil, Ferrari joined the local experimental circuit, involving with the process of language revitalization through the production of heliographies, photocopies, musical instruments, concerts and mail art. Upon returning to Argentina, the artist continued to produce politically engaged artworks, questioning the disappearances that occurred during the Military Dictatorship. León Ferrari was born in 1920 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he lived until his death in 2013. His works were exhibited at major international exhibitions, such as: The Words of Others: León Ferrari and Rhetoric in Times of War, Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), Miami, USA, 2018, and Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT), Los Angeles, USA, 2017-18; La donación Ferrari, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (MAMBA), Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2014; León Ferrari - Brailles y Relecturas de la Biblia, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA), Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2012; Tangled Alphabets: León Ferrari and Mira Schendel, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, USA, 2009; León Ferrari: Poéticas e Políticas, Pinacoteca do Estado do São Paulo, Brazil, 2006; León Ferrari: retrospectiva. Obras 1954-2004, Centro Cultural Recoleta (CCR), Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2004; and Politiscripts, The Drawing Center (TDC), New York, USA, 2004. He participated in Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tense at the 52nd Venice Biennale (Italian Pavilion and Arsenal), in 2007, receiving the Golden Lion Award. His works are present in important institutional collections, such as: Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), Miami, USA; Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), Chicago, USA; Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam, La Habana, Cuba; Daros Latinamerica Collection, Zürich, Switzerland; Fondo Nacional de las Artes, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA), Argentina; Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM-RJ), Brazil; Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM-SP), Brazil; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil; The Museum of Fine Arts (MFAH), Houston, USA; The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, USA; Tate Modern, London, UK; among others.

Continue Frans Krajcberg (1921 - 2017) Frans Krajcberg was a Polish sculptor and visual artist. Born in 1921, Frans Krajcberg passed away in 2017. Between 1948 and 1954, he created his first sculptures and paintings expressing the direct exposure to nature and an attempt to make elements of the natural environment the sole material used in his works. In 1951, he participated in the 1st São Paulo Art Biennial. He moved to the Minas Gerais state in Brazil, to the Pico da Cata Branca cave in the Itabirito region. The locals called him ‘barbudo das pedras’ (the bearded stone man), as he lived an ascetic life in isolation, washing in the nearby river and sculpting in stone. Zé do Mato, the artist's exhibition assistant and technician, reminisces that Krajcberg ‘wanted to run away from humans, he resembled a wounded animal.’ He was saved by Brazilian nature, which smiled at him and never asked where he came from and what his religion was. 'That is when discovered life' – the artist confessed in an interview. He later moved to the state of Paraná in southern Brazil, where he was hired as an engineer at a paper factory, but eventually moved to an isolated location in a forest and started painting (1952–1956). In 1956, he started living in Rio de Janeiro, where he shared a studio with Franz Weissmann (1911–2005), an Austrian artist, one of the major Brazilian sculptors of 20th century, and a student of August Zamoyski. A year later, Krajcberg obtained Brazilian citizenship and received the title of the country's best painter at the São Paulo Biennial. Beginning in the late 1950s, he often travelled to Europe, temporarily living in Paris, as well as Ibiza and Brazil. During that period, he created oil paintings and sculpted, drawing inspiration from Japanese art. In 1959, while in Ibiza, he started creating monochromatic reliefs decorated with natural pigments – Terras craqueladas (Cracked Earth). In 1964, he took part in the Venice Biennale, and afterwards returned permanently to Brazil, where he established an art studio in Cata Blanca and started creating sculptures and other spatial forms. That was when he created his first sculptures out of dead cedar trees. In 1970, he gained international recognition thanks to his sculptures made of charred wood. Krajcberg also started creating a new cycle titled Cutout Shadows, created out of specially trimmed vines.

Continue Nelson Leirner (1932 - 2020) Born in São Paulo in 1932 Nelson Leirner has no predilection for winners. The football game in one of his best known works titled “Futebol” (“Football”, 2001) ends in a draw, though he devised it for the World Cup 2006. His artefacts exemplify the change in Brazilian art from adversity to diversity since the 1960s, and his “Futebol” ironically serialises modern cult objects which have sunk to the level of kitsch. His rethinking of modern industrialised pop culture brought him the honour of representing Brazil at the 48th Venice Biennial in 1999 and has made him one of Brazil’s most famous artists. However, international acclaim shows that he has been successfully assimilated by the art industry, whose ploys his life had been dedicated to exposing. In 1966, together with Geraldo de Barros and Wesley Duke Lee, Nelson Leirner founded the São Paulo “Grupo Rex” which both humorously and aggressively criticised the dominant system of production, valuation and marketing of art at the time. On resolving to shut their magazine and gallery the following year, they turned this information with a humorous gesture into a happening by announcing that Nelson Leirner’s paintings could be taken home. After this announcement the gallery visitors stormed the gallery and tore the paintings into pieces. This reduced the acquisition of art and the artist’s role to absurdity. This should be seen against the background of the Tropicalia movement favouring the participatory rather than the elitist, the national rather than the international, and the home-made rather than the commercial. Nelson Leirner had already taken part in the São Paulo exhibition “Propostas 65”, whose artists were striving for “contemporary realism in Brazil” in the tradition of Hélio Oiticicas’ “New Brazilian Objectivity”. In the catalogue they were advised by Sérgio Ferro to forget “good manners and grammatical constraints” so as “to formulate the new with the necessary rawness”. In many of his provocations Nelson Leirner has been content to heed this advice. In 1966 he submitted a wooden cage holding a stuffed pig with a ham tied to its tail for an exhibition in Brasilia. On its acceptance he asked for the criteria of the decision. This led to three months of debate about art and the jury, during which he and his work were virtually forgotten. Originally, he had planned to collect his jailed pig, which had been sacrificed for the sake of its ham, and take it back to São Paulo sparkling with medals, but censors intervened. The political symbolism, questioning whether a jailed pig can be said to be still alive, was not lost on the authorities in the years of military dictatorship. Leirner was in no position to question the authorities directly, so he did so through aggressive intelligible metaphors. These included hens on racks under a mechanical torturing machine to behead them on the one hand and scissors with wings to castrate and kill on the other. Erotic allusions served him as alibis, enabling him to tell censors that his art was not about politics, but about sex. From the start of the 70s he taught for two decades at the Faculdade Armando Á lvares Penteado. He stresses that he did not do this because of the censorship but for the sake of the sympathetic principal, who had invited him to teach there, and for the sake of verbal intercourse with the young, which he enjoyed. He believes that since the start of the 80s the system has become slier. It buys and exhibits the works of its critics to undermine their credibility. The more an artist attacks society, the more he sells and the more commercial he seems to be. This, according to Leiner, is the logic of scandalisation. Although he attacks the United States, the globalisation, the US-hegemony in Latin America in his series of postcolonial postcards entitled “Assim é se lhe parece” (“Right You Are If You Think You Are”, 2003) his works are also bought in the United States. An installation of his, mocking the mechanism of art auctions like Sotheby’s, was appreciated and sold at Christie’s. “You can’t dodge the mechanism except by retiring!”, he exlains. But retirement for him is no option. From the 60s to the end of the 70s he knew who his foes were and wanted to hit them as hard as possible. They were not only representatives of the dictatorship but also of the art market. With "Homenagem a Fontana" (1967) he tried with the help of zips to demystify the relationship between art and industry and to sell the series, each made up of 25 items, at production prices. But the prices, reckoned by simply adding the costs of frames, zips, cloths, working time and profit were unacceptable. The "system" insisted on including the value added price of the artist’s reputation and awarded him the first prize at the Tokyo Biennial in 1967. But even now Nelson Leirner questions the romantic notion of the artist: "If anyone now asks me if I make art, I reply: ´No, I make a product.´ I have no wish to be an artist. Society wishes me to be one. If someone wishes to call me an artist, he can, but I’m not an artist. I’m the head of a business." The rethinking of images, as in Leirner’s series "Assim é se lhe parece" ("Right You Are If You Think You Are", 2003) typifies his minimalism dating back to the 80s in borrowing and repeating conventional icons. The US flag is planted over the whole globe in a wave of colonization, or colourful Mickey Mice or black and white matchstick figures colonize North or South America in a diptych. He likewise deals subversively or iconoclastically with representation in the works of artists ranging from Leonardo via Duchamp to Warhol in coming to terms with art and its history. In his installtion "La Gioconda" (1999) Nelson Leirner takes the vulgarisation of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa to an extreme and ironically comments on the image by mingling highbrow and everyday culture, kitsch and pop icons. He uses the same approach in his installation "Futebol" ("Fooball", 2001) and "A grande parada" ("The great parade", 1998), made up of two installations which he first put together for the exhibition "Copa da Cultura" (2006) in the House of World Cultures in Berlin. In this version, the procession he created for the Venice Biennial in 1999 becomes a crowd of football enthusiasts queuing up at a stadium. Evolution and history dissolve into the imaginary folklore of internationally known idols. There is no progress within the "Grande Parada", just as there are no winners in the game of life symbolized by football. The two ensembles of figures, which partly overlap, ranges from Christ and the saints on the one hand to Buddha-figures and an African water goddess on the other. Viewers in the stadium include Snowwhite and a good deal more than seven dwarves and other denizens of Disneyworld as well as monks with shaven heads and black jazz singers in white suits and white bowler hats. But who are the football players, and what is the game? The players are all apes who are wearing different numbers but not even shirts. Nelson Leirner explains that members of the military were referred to as apes in Brazil in the 70s, whereas in the 80s apes came to stand for endangered species. All viewers with their own culturally acquired signs and symbols are welcome to their own interpretations. In the House of World cultures they can become part of the installation "Waiting Room" by seeing themselves mirrored beside apes with lips reddened by lipstick. Nelson Leirner explains that he chose female apes as being the prettier. He is generally disinclined to offer explanations but admits that football has long been part of his family tradition. Before his father’s emigration to Brazil in the 1920s he played in the Polish army team. Nelson Leirner likes to sit in a back row and listen to viewers explaining what his works are really about. Thanks to a lecture given by the head of the New York Brooklyn Museum he learnt that in "Futebol", despite the abundance of figures and hues, there are no team songs or yells of encouragement. The installation reveals a state of football or society in which individuals have frozen into silent ciphers and global consumers, no matter how funny and colourful they remain. He agrees that in spite of their merry appearance his installations are basically sad. After all, he has more than 30 years of psychoanalysis behind him. In "Futebol" there are no winners, and the goalies are saints. These were the first figures he added before searching for others. Even in the finale on the Day of Judgement there can be no winners. Leirner surmises rather that in the last of all possible installations he should perhaps pulverize all his figures and dissolve them into thin air. Not even he will have won. Conceptual art has lost its power, he regrets, since artists’ statements are now geared to curators’ marketing concepts. He began his career by wielding the hammer of art to demolish dictators, but he now believes he has only his figures to demolish, just as his paintings were torn in the 60s by viewers. This cycle of events may be Nelson Leirner’s own vision of "Antropofagismo".