Helio Oiticica

Hélio Oiticica (1937–80) is widely considered one of Brazil’s most significant artists, and his influence is felt across a range of disciplines including painting, film, installation and participatory art. He is well known as a key founder of the interdisciplinary movement known as Neoconcretismo, launched in Rio de Janeiro in 1959 with the collaboration of artists and writers including Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape and Ferreira Gullar. Between 1964 and 1966, moving out of his Neoconcretist period, Oiticica wrote a series of lyrical poems entitled "Poética Secreta" (Secret Poetics), and he reflected in a private notebook on their significance for his wider practice as an artist. Despite Oiticica’s global fame, his "secret" poems are almost unknown and have never been published as a collection. This bilingual edition, with accompanying essays by translator Rebecca Kosick and critic Pedro Erber, uncovers the significance of poetry for Oititica’s art and shows its importance to his thinking on participation, sensation and memory.

This book offers an examination of the iconic Parangolés, or capes, used by Brazilian performance artist Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980). Reflecting residual memory from the Brazilian favelas and carnival, the Parangolés are manifestations of ancestral rituals and the rhythms of the body and nature.

Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica’s (1937–80) oeuvre remains an indisputable influence on all aspects of avant-garde culture in his home country and abroad, from visual art to music, theater, literature and beyond. This volume demonstrates the numerous ways in which Oiticica’s work explored and expanded formal artistic modes, pushing past the boundaries of color and structure. Oiticica prioritized the inclusive and participatory possibilities of art, represented through his forays into environmental art and interactive installation. Large-scale projects such as his monumental installation Tropicália (1966–67), which satirizes the idea of Brazil as a tropical paradise, are documented alongside his works on paper and textile pieces. The text traces the evolution of Oiticica’s multidisciplinary practice and underlines the cosmological ideas that guided his approach to art and life, demonstrating the profound impact Oiticica's ideas had on the wider art world, both past and present.

One of the most radical and joyful artists of the 20th century, Hélio Oiticica (1937-80) helped lead the charge in Brazilian art’s unique transition from abstract concrete art to performative objects and collective performance.

As MoMA’s 2019 exhibition Sur Moderno demonstrated, one of Oiticica’s most revolutionary projects was the Parangolé, wearable sculptures made from fabric, plastic or paper. The Parangolé is meant to be worn, inhabited and danced by a participant, lending a physical spontaneity to the piece that entirely blurs the boundaries between the art object and those who experience it.

Dance in My Experience traces the genealogy of this theme within the artist’s oeuvre, identifying rhythmic, choreographic and dance elements throughout his trajectory, from his first Metaesquemas through the Spatial Reliefs, Nuclei and Bólides, culminating in the Parangolés. It includes texts by Oiticica and contributions by numerous scholars.