Leonard Eyer at the Netherlands Photo Museum

Brazil Contemporary is an overview exhibition compiled by the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI), Museum Boijmans van Beuningen and the Netherlands Photo Museum. These three institutions have joined forces to introduce to the general public Brazilian artists, architects, photographers and designers.

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen presents a survey of the contemporary art of Brazil. The work of Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980) occupies pride of place. Oiticica considered that Brazil should not just passively undergo and imitate Western influences, but that artists should transmute these influences into a uniquely Brazilian culture. According to Bregje van Woensel, curator of the exposition at Boijmans, contemporary Brazilian art is characterised by a highly-structured and controlled approach to material and design. The exhibition shows to what extent today’s artists are still under the influence of Oiticica, with works by Ernesto Neto, Rivane Neuenschwander, Cao Guimaraes and Ricardo Bassbaum.

Thanks to the work of Oscar Niemeyer, Lúcio Costa and Roberto Burle Marx, twentieth-century Brazil developed a surprisingly unique urban modernism. It “was sentenced to the future”, as phrased by Paul Meurs, who compiled the exposition on São Paulo in the NAI.

The Netherlands Photo Museum zooms in on the rapidly changing Brazilian visual culture with its mixture of high and low, elitist and populist, artistic and applied. The exhibition shows not only photography, but also other old and new media, television and internet, with an panorama on fashion and graphic design, featuring the work of — among others — Marcelo Martinez and Leonardo Eyer.

via Surprising Brazilian art in Rotterdam | The Power of Culture.