The Museu Coleção Berardo is currently showing the exhibition Modernismo Brasileiro na Coleção da Fundação Edson Queiroz [Brazilian Modernism at the Edson Queiroz Foundation’s Collection] which tries to discuss the evolution of Brazilian modern art through the twentieth century. In this sense, one may become knowledgeable of the singular path that several expressions took in creating a rather unique language called Neoconcretism.

From 1920 to 1960 the works argue what was a critical position on modernity and how the art produced in Brazil could, inside the polysomic and global discourse that was being developed, create an art enmeshed in its traditions, in its territory and in its communities. Quoting Luiz Camillo Osorio, the neoconcretism “overcame the planarity” and, “in its most experimental and radical way”, would erase the so-called “mediation of the object, the traditional distance between art and creative process, between form and aesthetic experience”. In other words, this was a movement that achieved the “articulation between art and life” (1).

Thus, the exhibition has some unmissable names of the Brazilian and global art scene, such as, in chronological order, Lasar Segall, Flávio de Carvalho, Anita Malfatti, Vicente do Rego Monteiro and Victor Brecheret, Tarsila do Amaral, Cícero Dias, Di Cavalcanti and Candido Portinari, the Frente Group and the Ruptura Group, Ivan Serpa, Tomie Ohtake and Iberê Camargo – these last ones closely reaching Conceptual Art.

Modernismo Brasileiro na Coleção da Fundação Edson Queiroz was curated by Regina Teixeira de Barros and may be seen until 11 February in Museu Coleção Berardo.

(1) Osorio, Luiz Camillo, “Olhar à margem” (2016). São Paulo SESI-SP Editora: Cosac Naify.