Roberto Marx, Parque do Flamengo-Praca Senador salgado Filho, 1957, Photograph Wilton Montenegro. |
Rio de Janeiro 1956-1964, a Hotbed of Contemporary Art |
Ivan Serpa, Faixas Ritmadas, 1958, © Ivan Serpa, Photograph Jaime Accioli.
Hélio Oiticica, Três tempos (quadro 1), 1956, © Hélio Oiticica, Photograph Paulinho Muniz. |
Moderna Museet For many years, it seemed as though art from around 1960 appeared to be entirely shaped by those two cities New York and Paris. In hindsight, however, it is obvious that other “creative pockets” arose in entirely different places, with just as radical artistic projects. In connection with Moderna Museet’s 50th Anniversary in 2008, three exhibitions will focus on three such places around the world: Rio de Janeiro, Milan/Turin and Los Angeles. The idea is to explore the period when Moderna Museet was created from an international perspective, by featuring a representative selection of works of art, architecture, design, literature, film and music never before shown together in Sweden. Three separate catalogues have been produced for the Time & Place exhibitions by Steidl publishers. The exhibition on Rio de Janeiro presents art that thrived in the creative cultural atmosphere permeating the city in the 1950s and early 60s. In this new, innovative society, artists, architects, musicians, filmmakers and writers worked together. Rio de Janeiro expanded into a metropolis with some 2.5 million inhabitants. Life adapted to more economically, culturally and socially modern conditions. Copacabana became the symbol of a new lifestyle, which was open, spontaneous and dominated by the young generation. Brazil wanted to build a new society for a new kind of people; open and imaginative, friendly without being sentimental, rational without being mechanical — a citizen liberated from the partriarchal past. The keyword was New, as in Neo-concretism, Bossa Nova (new wave) in music, and Cinema Novo in film. A unique Brazilian design idiom developed, with terse shapes and an emphasis on construction. Neo-concretism was Brazil’s reinterpretation of constructivism and became the nation’s first modern contribution to a universal visual idiom. The pioneers of the style focused on issues of space and spatiality and on the process of creating the work, which they saw as integrated with the space itself. The exhibition will include works by Lygia Clark, Milton Dacosta, Amilcar de Castro, Hélio Oiticica, Franz Weissmann and others. Curator of the exhibition is Paolo Venancio Filho, critic and associate professor at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and project manager is Annika Gunnarsson, curator Moderna Museet. |
Hélio Oiticica, Voo alto pra cima, pra dentro e pra fora, 1958, Photo: Paulinho Muniz. |
