Río de Janeiro (Brasil), 1937 – 1980
By Francisco Alambert
Performance artist, painter, sculptor, and theorist. Son of photographer, painter, university professor, and entomologist José Oiticica Filho, and brother of painter and architect César Oiticica, Hélio Oiticica was the grandson of José Oiticica, an important philologist and anarchist activist who influenced his upbringing. Due to a family decision, he did not attend school until the age of ten, receiving education from his mother. In 1947, he moved with his family to Washington, D.C. (USA) when his father received a Guggenheim Foundation grant. Upon returning to Brazil in 1954, he began studying art at Ivan Serpa’s school at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro (MAM/RJ), where his studies emphasized free creation and experimentation. That same year, he wrote the first of his many texts on art.
Between 1955 and 1956, Hélio Oiticica was part of the Grupo Frente of concrete artists, and in 1959, he joined the Neoconcrete Group, a breakaway movement from concretism, participating in the group’s second exhibition in 1960 in Rio de Janeiro. In 1956, he took part in the collective exhibition Pintura Brasileña Contemporánea in Montevideo, at the Uruguayan-Brazilian Culture Institute. The following year, his works were exhibited in Buenos Aires, Rosario, Lima, and Santiago, Chile. Also in 1957—the same year he participated in the São Paulo Biennial (to which he returned in 1965, 1977, and with a major exhibition in 1998)—he began the Metaesquemas series, a collection of gouache paintings on paper. From that point, he shifted from two-dimensional works to spatial and cultural environment projects, such as Invenções (1959), which marked his transition from canvas to environmental space. He theorized about these experiences and the work of his friend Lygia Clark.
In 1960, he created the first Núcleos, later called Manifestações Ambientais (1964) and Penetráveis, in which both the viewer’s movement and the motion of materials were integral to the experience. At the opening of the Opinião 65 exhibition at MAM/RJ, he was expelled from the museum for protesting the prohibition of members of the Mangueira samba school from entering. In response, he organized a collective demonstration outside the museum, during which he introduced his Parangolés—sculptural forms meant to be worn and moved by samba dancers. The following year, he participated in the Opinião 66 exhibition, and in 1967, in Nova Objetividade Brasileira, where he presented the environmental installation Tropicália. That same year, he took part in the Paris and Tokyo Biennials. In 1969, the Whitechapel Experience exhibition was held at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, showcasing his Éden project, organized by British critic Guy Brett. Also that year, Oiticica was an artist-in-residence at Sussex University.
In 1970, he developed the Ninhos project for the Information exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, based on communal experience cells. That same year, he received a Guggenheim Foundation grant and moved to New York. In 1971, he held his solo exhibition Rhodislândia: Contact at Rhode Island University, and in 1972, he participated in the collective event Latin American Fair of Opinion at Saint Clement’s Church in New York. During this period, he experimented with Super-8 films, such as Agripina é Roma Manhattan, among dozens of environmental projects. In 1977, his works were included in the exhibition Projeto Construtivo Brasileiro na Arte: 1950-1962 at MAM/RJ.
Oiticica returned to Brazil in 1978, dedicating himself to collective events such as Mitos Vadios in São Paulo and Homenagem a Mário Pedrosa in 1980 at the Jean Boghici Gallery in Rio de Janeiro. After his death, the Hélio Oiticica Project was established in 1981 in Rio de Janeiro to preserve, analyze, and promote his work. Between 1992 and 1997, the project organized a major retrospective exhibition, presented in Rotterdam, Paris, Barcelona, Lisbon, Minneapolis, and Rio de Janeiro. In 1996, the Rio de Janeiro Municipal Department of Culture created the Hélio Oiticica Art Center to house and promote the artist’s collection.
