9/14/2023 0 Comments Helio oiticica art![]() ![]() They were offset so they leapt out into space just a little bit.Īnd we have four paints related to the Invention series and these are all bright, brilliant reds in tone. So he went through a bunch of different series as he broke out of strictly two dimensional art, and the first series to really do that he called Inventions and these were square paintings that hung off from the wall. Hélio Oiticica paint samples in four glass bottles with hand labeled paper labels and stoppers.Ĭory Rogge: Wow, complicated question. Documentation, Materials and PaintsĬatherine Cooper: Have you been able to see the convergence of his documentation of a work with one of the few that still exist with the artists’ paints that you have? So long story short, those are the paint collections and that’s how they came to live in Houston. He was mixing his colors by mixing different amounts of other paints and we don’t always know what was in the other paints and he’ll say, “I mixed a soup spoon of this brand of paint’s Vermilion red with this teaspoon of an orange paint with this.” We won’t know what the Vermilion really is, so we’re trying to pick that out as well. So now what we’re interested in doing is taking the paints, figuring out what the pigments are, and then figuring out what the binding media is and then seeing how that relates to what his recipes were because he wasn’t mixing his paints by taking pigment and mixing it with oil. And in his notebook he’ll say, “This color of yellow is made by mixing one soup spoon of this with one coffee spoon of this and a teaspoon or two of that.” So we don’t know the volumes that were involved really, but we can guesstimate. So we had a soup spoon and a teaspoon and a coffee spoon. They weren’t always very accurate in that he measured out his amounts in spoons. And then Oiticica also kept journals: he kept diagrams for his artwork, he kept recipes of what the color mixtures were that he was using on a given piece of art. And they give us insight into what the colors of his art should be. And so these paints are the only records we have of what was on his art. © César and Claudio Oiticica Recreating Artwork Lost in Rio FireĪlso, unfortunately a lot of his extant artwork burned in a fire in Rio. And we were interested in them because number one, they’re a record of what he used, which is interesting of itself. Until I showed up and got asked to look at them as part of a Getty project on concrete art in Los Angeles. And he kept amazing journals and he kept his paints.Īnd so as part of this exhibition, our Mari Carmen and our then head of conservation went down to Brazil, brought the artworks back for treatment, but also brought all of the extant studio materials that were still with Oiticica’s family.Īnd at that point there wasn’t a scientist here in Houston. And so he kind of, despite being an artist, had a scholarly or a scientific approach to what he was doing. © César and Claudio Oiticica Oiticica FamilyĪnd Oiticica’s father was a scientist, an engineer, and an entomologist and a mathematician, and Oiticica actually worked in the museum where his father worked. Hélio Oiticica paint sample in an old green paint can with a cartoon figure holding a paintbrush. So very geometrical, very rigid paintings.Īnd Oiticica was really interested in art, but he quickly became bored with the two-dimensional aspect of things and launched his art into three dimensions, all the while being very interested in color. Concrete means constructivist, more like Mondrian. ![]() ![]() And here, concrete doesn’t mean like concrete sidewalks. Oiticica was a Brazilian artist and he kind of came of artistic age at the very end of the concrete art movement in Brazil. And in the early 2000s our Latin American arts curator, Mari Carmen Ramírez, reached out to the Oiticica family because she was interested in doing a show on Hélio Oiticica, who had died in 1980. Paint sample being taken from a red section of a colored plywood art piece.Ĭatherine Cooper: I’m here at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston with Cory Rogge.Ĭatherine Cooper: And today I wanted to ask you about the Hélio Oiticica collection that you have here that you’ve been working with.Ĭory Rogge: So we have an amazing Latin American arts collection at the MFAH. ![]()
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