Lot 17: Hélio Oiticica

Limite-Lumificaças
Signed, titled, and dated in Portuguese 'Helio Oiticica Limite-Lumificaças 1958'.

45.1 x 53.7 cm (17 3/4 x 21 1/8 in).

Gouache on board.

1958

Acquired directly from the artist by the previous owner and then by descent

As one of the most innovative Brazilian artists of his generation, Hélio Oiticica is a significant and influential figure in the development of contemporary art - a status confirmed by the critically acclaimed posthumous retrospective recently held at Tate Modern, London, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In his relatively short but fertile career, and working across an eclectic range of media, Oiticica produced a remarkable body of work ranging from abstract compositions to early environmental installations, continually seeking to challenge the wy in which art could be experienced. As a co-founder, along with Lygia Clark, of the short-lived Neo-Constructionist movement, Oiticica liberated art from its traditional conceptual limits via his avant-garde aesthetic and working methods. The extremely rare-to-market Oiticica, Whose oeuvre was tragically and dramatically reduced last year by a fire at his brother's residence in Rio de Janeiro, is an inspirational forefather to an entire generation of performance artists working today.
The present lot, Limite-Lumificaças, is a very early 1958 abstract composition on paper which shows an obvious affinity with the masters of modernism Paul Klee, Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian. The work belongs to Oiticica's Metaesquemas series, in which the twenty-year-old artist forged a more organic, experimental path towards the pure representation of space and colour than that of his modernist predecessors. As the artist once explained, the Metaesquemas are something that lies inbetween, that is neither painting nor drawing. It is rather an evolution of painting. 'I tried to cleanse colour, leaving the cardboard raw'  (M.C. Ramirez, 'The Embodiment of Color - "From the Inside Out" in Helio Oiticica:The Body of Color, Houston, The Museum of Fine Arts, 2007, p.41).
An Obsessive dissection of space, the rectangular shapes in the present lot are arranged in a grid-like structure without complete regularity, and seem to rythmically shift and float slightly off the surface of the paper. This dynamic composition is further enhanced by Oiticica's use of mirror effect, which generates a sense of instability and movement, thus challenging the two-dimentionality of those most traditional of artistic materials - the paper and its support.