Aberto Fechado Caixa e Livro na Arte Brasileira Guy Brett

The enclosed openness : box and book in Brazilian art. In his first curatorial endeavor for a Brazilian museum, the renowned British art critic and curator Guy Brett proposes an analysis of a common phenomenon in Brazilian art: the use of the box-form and the book-form in the works of Brazilian artists from the second half of the twentieth century. Why, at a time when artists were concerned with taking art out of galleries and museums and releasing it “into real life”, did they become interested in these restricted, closed vehicles that strongly refer to libraries and archives? “I believe this question, writes Brett, is the key to understanding the unique experiences and insights that the Brazilian avant-garde has to offer.” For Frederico Morais, art critic, “both art forms had their first impulse between the last years of the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s, influenced by neoconcretism. Indeed, the creative audacity of the neo-concretists, allied to the elaboration of innovative theoretical concepts, such as the non-object, formulated by Ferreira Gullar, built a solid basis for the new formal experiments. These concepts were vital: the artwork as a “living organism” and the active participation of the spectator”.

Portuguese