Rio das Artes

From the 1980s onwards, the visual arts began to coexist with the various practices that emerged in previous decades and which expanded their traditional definition into different techniques, media, and scales. Increasingly, the term “contemporary art” was used to define such a varied field of proposals and works. With the global expansion of markets, starting from the globalization of the end of the century and with the speed of networks and digital culture in the 21st century, contemporary art gained a new international dynamic and new institutions that engage in dialogue with such transformations. In Brazil in particular, redemocratization and the stabilization of the currency expanded this contemporary shift, removing from local artists the underdeveloped or peripheral label and inserting them into new aesthetic dynamics, in permanent dialogue with the world. In Rio de Janeiro, the numbers of studios, exhibitions, subversions, and institutions grew, transforming the city into one of the creative references of the new millennium.