Ernesto Neto

Río de Janeiro, Brazil - 1964

            Ernesto Neto believes that the work of an artist is inseparable from the connection between body and mind. Neto emphasizes the weight of experience both in life and in the realization of his artworks. Being in the world includes experiencing sounds, the force of gravity, relationships between objects, and people. Neto was trained at the bucolic Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage and the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro. Born and raised in that city, he acknowledges several influences in his creations. One of them is the city itself, located by the Atlantic Ocean, where life within the water is part of daily life.

            The search for balance between nature and human occupation is one of his central concerns, showing how humans increasingly raise barriers and limits to try to mitigate the imbalance they generate on Earth. At the same time, he recognizes a significant influence from the Huni Kuin indigenous community, where the connection between humans and nature is not detached, allowing him to continue exploring these relationships but from another cosmology. His proposals always call for some kind of immersion: taking off shoes, entering the artwork, and physically engaging with it. The possibility of immersing oneself in his creations is a constant throughout his work.

            His breakthrough in the international art world came at the 49th Venice Biennale, where he presented a monumental installation titled "Ô bicho!" as a tribute to Lygia Clark, a fellow Brazilian artist who was part of the unclassifiable and daring neo-concrete movement that emerged in the 1960s in Brazil. The artwork, a large nylon fabric extended over the ceiling with hanging sacks filled with glass beads and rice grains, represents, according to Neto, the skin of a living body, a porous surface between interior and exterior. Neto's work thus proposes a double invitation. On one hand, it invites creation with simple yet symbolically powerful elements and structures, crafted with techniques such as crocheting that he learned from his grandmother. And also, it invites us to be protagonists of a playful adventure, to immerse ourselves in his installations, which are stimuli for all senses: visual, tactile, auditory, and even olfactory.