Helio Oiticica y Neville d`Almeida

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1937

            Hélio Oiticica emerged as one of the most revolutionary figures in 20th-century Brazilian art, radically transforming notions of space, participation, and aesthetic experience. Born in Rio de Janeiro into an intellectual family—his father was a photographer and entomologist, and his grandfather a prominent anarchist leader—he grew up surrounded by progressive ideas that shaped his vision. Largely self-taught, Oiticica began his artistic training under the guidance of Ivan Serpa at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio (MAM) in 1954, joining the Grupo Frente, and later the Neoconcrete movement (1959–1961), which advocated for an art that transcended two-dimensionality and connected with life itself. His work, which defied traditional boundaries of art, became a manifesto of freedom, proposing direct interaction between viewer and creation through concepts like “supersensoriality” and “environmental art.”

            Between 1973 and 1974, he created the Cosmococa series in collaboration with Neville D’Almeida, developed during his exile in New York following Brazil’s military dictatorship. Cosmococa, subtitled Maileryn, is an immersive installation combining slide projections, music, and interactive objects: images of Marilyn Monroe, taken from a book by Norman Mailer, are projected onto a suspended hammock, while lines of cocaine drawn over the images and Jimi Hendrix’s music fill the space. The piece invites viewers to lie down in the hammock and experience a multisensory atmosphere, reflecting the influence of 1970s New York, where Oiticica lived between 1970 and 1978, absorbing the counterculture and the vibrancy of the underground art scene. Maileryn not only pays homage to pop iconography but also questions the relationship between art, the body, and desire, proposing an experience that dissolves hierarchies between creator and participant.

            Oiticica’s use of participatory and ephemeral techniques, his creation of immersive environments, and his use of everyday materials—fabrics, pigments, hammocks—reflect his commitment to democratizing art, a core principle that runs through all his work. From the Parangolés (1964–1979), fabric capes that spectators could wear and dance in, to the Penetráveis (1960–1979), structures designed to be entered and felt, his work sought to liberate art from the confines of museums and transform it into a collective act. His institutional recognition includes retrospectives at Tate Modern in London (2007) and the Whitney Museum in New York (2017), as well as presence in permanent collections such as MoMA and MAM Rio. Through his legacy, Oiticica not only redefined the concept of art in Brazil, but also offered a poetic testament to how sensory experience can become an act of resistance and communion.