Helio Oiticica at the Whitney Museum

Whitney Museum’s To Organize Delirium is the first full-scale U.S. retrospective of Oiticica’s work in two decades

Peter Schjeldahl’s comment in The New Yorker “Cradled in a hammock (in one of the rooms of the exhibition) the other day, I couldn’t imagine anywhere in the world I would rather be” should be enough to make you feel like going to Oiticica’s show at the Whitney. I myself would absolutely love to.

Although there are critics who complain about the way the show was put together, that it feels sketchy and shallow, it comes as an overdue revelation of the work Oiticica did, especially in the 8 years he spent in NYC.

The Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica, who died in his early 40s, is said to be one of the 20th century’s most innovative artists. According to the director of MFAA, “Oiticica’s legacy and influence remains largely unknown, yet he was an artist with singular vision, and stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Europe’s and America ’s modern masters. In 2007 there was a major exhibition (more than 150 pieces ) of his work at Tate Modern that came to MFAH in Houston. Now he is at the Whitney with the exhibition “To organize delirium”.

Oiticica started his work at a very young age. At 18 he joined a small collective group of geometric abstract artists in Rio called Grupo Frente and started his studies on color. At 22, as a response to both political and formal aspects of Concretism, he and a few other artists from Grupo Frente formed the Neo Concretism group. They believed Concretism was “naive and somewhat colonialist”, serving dictatorial regimes, and that they had an “overly rational conception of abstract structure.”  Oiticica was interested in using color to “escape the constraints of painting while remaining in dialogue with it” and worked on suspended paintings and reliefs: Spatial Reliefs, Bilaterals, Nuclei series, Bólides (a series of small box shaped interactive sculptures) and Penetrables (which had panels and doors which viewers could move and explore).

In 68, at age 31, with the military dictatorship fully established in Brazil, he left the country, going first to England and then to NYC, where he stayed for the next 7 years. During his time in NYC he filled notebooks with ideas for Penetrables that he had no support or means to build then. In 78 Oiticica returned to Brazil, and worked on Parangolés, costumes (partly banner) that only become pieces of art, when worn, preferably while dancing.

Oiticica died in 1980 at age 42. He became known for having produced work that actively brings the spectator to a closer, more tactile contact with the object of art, allowing him/her to move thru it and experience a non contemplative contact with the work, thus becoming a participator.

http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/HelioOiticica