About the Artists and the Commission: Inside/Outside
For the Brazilian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, curator Luis Pérez-Oramas selected five Brazilian artists from different generations along with one Bauhaus artist. Together, their works will be shown in a project that studies the Möbius strip—the infamous single-sided surface with only one boundary component.
About the Artists:
Hélio Fervenza’s expansive multimedia art practice is rooted in his career as an academic. Fervenza, who holds a doctorate degree in fine arts from the Sorbonne, is known for his research-based processes, particularly regarding his self-presentation as an artist, interpersonal relationships, and the art-making process. Read more.
Odires Mlászho, born José Odires Micowski, so deeply admired Max Ernst and László Moholy-Nagy that he paid homage to them by borrowing parts of their names for his own pseudonym. Mlászho was drawn to the two artists because he considered them to be masters of photomontage, which would become his preferred way of making work. Read more.
Influenced by Constructivism and the Bauhaus, Lygia Clark is in turn remembered for her impact on various art historical movements, especially as a pioneer in participatory art. During her early career in the 1950s, Clark produced geometric, system-based paintings and Constructivist-influenced sculpture. Read more.
Max Bill was a hugely influential founder of the Concrete Art movement, not only through his variegated career as a sculptor, painter, and industrial and graphic designer, but also as a prolific writer, scholar, and teacher. Bill had early ambitions to be a silversmith, but quickly changed his focus to architecture after seeing the work of Le Corbusier. Read more.
In his prolific, 70-year career, Bruno Munari became known for various contributions to art, industrial design, film, architecture, art theory, and technology—including an early model of the portable slide-projector. He liked to (falsely) claim that his name meant “to make something out of nothing” in Japanese. Read more
