Hélio Oiticica

This gouache drawing presents a group of black rectangles tilting rhythmically toward each other in a mirrored disposition: an imaginary axis runs vertically through the center of the work, dividing the composition into nearly symmetrical halves.

Oiticica was only twenty years old when he began working on his Metaesquemas series, which would eventually comprise more than 350 compositions. The Metaesquemas (Meta-Schemes) were pivotal in the young artist’s career, marking the shift from two-dimensional to three-dimensional space that he would pursue in his practice in subsequent years. He later described this series as exercises in the “obsessive dissection of space” aimed at destabilizing the spatial conventions of Concrete painting, a rationalist movement that promoted geometric abstraction and had dominated art-making in Brazil since the early 1950s. Indeed, the dynamic compositions in Oiticica’s Metaesquemas introduced an unprecedented range of whimsicality, upending the primacy and stability of the grid. The vibrating picture planes also subtly anticipated Oiticica’s ambition to transform viewers into active participants, a strategy that was formalized shortly thereafter in the 1959 manifesto of the Neo-Concrete movement, which counted Oiticica as one of its main proponents.

The artist.
? - 1997, Projeto Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro.
1997, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, purchased from Projeto Hélio Oiticica.