Born in Rio de Janeiro, Hélio Oiticica was one of the most inventive artists of the post-World War II period. A dreamer and an idealist, he created experiential environments where viewers became participants, enveloped in all means of artistic apparatuses. Oiticica identified strongly with his Brazilian roots and spent a great deal of time in the favelas of Rio, which he recognized as strongholds against the oppression of the military dictatorship in his country. His groundbreaking installation Tropicália (1967) was a sensorial portrait of Rio as well as an environment that engaged and absorbed viewers in a myriad of ways. Oiticica exhibited widely during his lifetime, with his acclaimed Whitechapel Experiment in London and later his efforts to make a name for himself in New York. Tragically the artist died very young and little is left of his artistic production, due to a terrible fire in 2009 that destroyed nearly 2000 of his works.

Much of what remains are Oiticica’s early works, which are stunning jewels that give insight into the young mind of an artistic genius, informing much of his later experiments. The present work, Metaesquema (1958), shows Oiticica’s grasp of European abstraction and the influence of artists like Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich, who pushed for an art that would transform society. The series of Metaesquemas produced from 1957 to 1958, demonstrate Oiticica’s preoccupation with color as an entity with its own time, structure and space. Yet, even as one of the youngest artists associated with the Grupo Frente, Oiticica quickly cannibalized the older members’ achievements, becoming a leader of the Neo-Concrete movement that would transform Brazilian art forever.