When Hélio Oiticica lived in Washington D.C. from 1947 to 1949, he viewed numerous works by Paul Klee in the National Gallery of Art, after which he encountered the great European artist’s work again at the São Paulo Bienal in 1953-54. During the 1950s, while studying under Ivan Serpa at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro, Oiticica would produce numerous jewel-like works on paper in which he explored various tenants of Concretism and color theory. Despite the fact that Oiticica was quick to disregard these early works, they were undoubtedly crucial to his later explorations in Neoconcretism, which critic Ferreira Gullar argued “represented a definitive break from the incomplete, overly formalist understanding of the historical avant-garde that had prevailed in Brazil theretofore and the adoption of a radical project to fulfill the spiritual and expressive transformations called for by Malevich and Mondrian” (Adele Nelson, Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium, Carnegie Museum of Art and Del Monico Books, p. 44). Oiticica’s definitive importance within the international art milieu was recognized in a major retrospective in the United States, which traveled from the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, to the Art Institute of Chicago, to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016-2017).