Hélio Oiticica: Public Writings

Hélio Oiticica's Public Writings will feature over 50 articles, interviews, essays, and public statements published by Oiticica between the years of 1960 and 1980, selected and translated into English by Rebecca Kosick. This writing spans highly active periods of the artist’s career—from the end of Neoconcretism, through the refinement of his participatory ethos and creation of series such as the Parangolé, to his years abroad in London and New York, and finally his return to Brazil at the end of his life. This selection of writings documents his thinking on objectivity, participation, the ‘suprasensorial,’ and ‘creleisure’ among other key aesthetic concepts of Oiticica’s. It also expresses his impressions of life overseas during Brazil’s military dictatorship, and his thoughts on the position of Brazil in the (art)world. Readers will come away from the book with a deeper understanding of Oiticica’s oeuvre, with a sense of Oiticica as an expansive and playful thinker, and with new insights into the polemical and innovative writing of one of the twentieth century’s most important artists.