Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Colour

Edited by Mari Carmen Ramirez

Helio Oiticica (1937-80) was one of the most creative artists of the twentieth century and played a key role in the development of Latin American art and culture. Since his premature death at the age of forty-three, his influence continues to grow. A key figure in the Tropicalia movement in Brazil that revolutionised popular music and the arts in the 1970s, he spent time in London and New York, where he forged new alliances and was a key influence on a wide range of artists. Among his most important artistic achievements was the innovative and uncompromising use of colour that was a feature of his entire career, from his early abstract compositions to his later sculptures and large-scale installations. Combining it with music, rhythm and performance, he used colour to stimulate visual and tactile sensations, drawing in and involving his audience. Combining essays by leading critics and extensive illustration, this is the most thorough exploration of Oiticica's art yet published.

ISBN 1854376985
Paperback £24.99
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Oiticica in London

Guy Brett & Luciano Figueiredo

At the end of the 1960s Oiticica spent a year in London, where, in 1969, he was invited to exhibit at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. The resulting exhibition, or Whitechapel Experiment as Oiticica preferred to call it, was the largest show he ever held and one of the most radical visual arts events of the period. It was structured as a continuous participatory environment for people, featuring paintings, sculpture and installation and culminating in Eden, built especially for the Whitechapel, a bare-foot, sensory, 'mind-settlement' of sand, cabins, beds and nests intended to stimulate among the public a form of creative reverie the artist called Creleisure.

This crucial period in the artist's life has never been thoroughly investigated before. Featuring interviews of Oiticica's contemporaries that provide telling new insights, writings by the artist translated for the first time, essays by leading critics and facsimile pages of the original Whitechapel catalogue, this book captures not only a pivotal moment in the life and career of a unique artist but also in the development of the avant-garde in London.

ISBN 1854377477
Paperback £14.99
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