NeoconcreteGroup

Amid the new modernizing leap that the visual arts were undergoing in the 1950s, historical landmarks worth noting include the founding of the Museums of Modern Art of Rio and São Paulo, the creation of the São Paulo International Art Biennial, and the expansion of outlets for critical thought to circulate through new national and international debates. One of these fundamental spaces was the renewed Sunday Supplement of the Jornal do Brasil, whose direction under Reynaldo Jardim and the graphic revolution led by Amílcar de Castro left their mark on the Rio and national press of the time.

Image description: This is an image of a painting with ten red rectangles arranged on a light beige background. The rectangles are organized in two horizontal rows. In the first row, there are three red rectangles positioned side by side. In the second row, there are two larger rectangles and five smaller rectangles, also arranged side by side. All the rectangles have well-defined edges and are a uniform shade of red.

This cultural and institutional effervescence contributed to the emergence of artist collectives, such as the Ruptura group, in São Paulo, in 1952, and the Frente group, from Rio de Janeiro, in 1954. These two collectives, a few years later, led into the Concrete and Neo-Concrete movements. Starting with the 1st Concrete Art Exhibition held at MAM SP in 1956, a new poetry, also of cosmopolitan and graphic matrix, began to articulate itself with the visual arts. Along with an often mathematical principle for forms, the color palette became more limited, the industrial aspect of materials gained more strength, and an original way of thinking about two-dimensional space and the art object charted singular paths for local art. In some way, artists who were already working with the themes of abstraction and geometry found common ground in this new aesthetic and conceptual proposal.

At first, the Concreto group (with São Paulo hegemony) would include different names originally linked to Grupo Frente. At the end of the decade, however, more precisely in 1959, the Rio segment broke with the Concretos and was named Neoconcreto. This occurred due to the gradual departure from the rigid principles of the São Paulo group after heated debates in the press of the time – such as the aforementioned Suplemento Dominical of the Jornal do Brasil and the Suplemento de Cultura of the Estado de São Paulo. Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari, Waldemar Cordeiro, and Ferreira Gullar are some of the artists, poets, and critics who marked out (not always smoothly) the differences between the movements.

Image description: The image is a black-and-white Sunday supplement. The layout runs from left to right, beginning with "rio, marco, 1959" in the upper left corner. Below it is a list of names in alphabetical order. In the center, in large black letters, is written "NEO EXPERIÊNCIA CONCRETA". On the right, there is more black text on a light background.

The Maranhão-born poet and visual artist Ferreira Gullar, who had settled in Rio since the early 1950s, was the most combative theorist of the group of artists that also included former names from Grupo Frente – such as Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, Hélio Oiticica, and Franz Weissman –, as well as other up-and-coming figures like Amílcar de Castro and Theon Spanudis. By putting forward his "theory of the non-object" in 1960, Gullar showed that the Rio-based Neo-Concrete artists were breaking away from the São Paulo school in favor of greater expressive freedom, including a more organic view of materials and a humanist reflection on the viewer's participation in the works.

These transformations usher in a new moment in the local art scene that emerged in the 1960s in the revolutionary works of Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica. Two artists who, with exhibitions in major museums around the world today, are internationally recognized as decisive names in twentieth-century contemporary art worldwide.

Image description: This is an aerial photograph of a sports complex located in a green area. On the left side, we see a curved road that extends toward the center of the image. In the center, there is a large body of water with several structures around it, including ramps and platforms. On the right, there is an area with several tents and parked vehicles. The background features more green areas and a circular structure. The predominant color is the green of the plants, contrasting with the gray asphalt of the roads and the turquoise blue water of the lake. There is no visible text in the image.