Beschreibung:

BRAZIL Ivan Serpa Untitled (Série Amazônica) 1969 oil on canvas 23 1/4 x 15 3/4 in. (59.1 x 40 cm.) Signed and dated "Serpa 1969" on the reverse.
Provenance Private Collection, New York Exhibited New York, Dickinson Roundell Gallery, Ivan Serpa Pioneering Abstraction in Brazil, November 1- December 21, 2012 Literature H. Nathan, ed., Ivan Serpa Pioneering Abstraction in Brazil, exh. cat., New York: Dickinson Roundell Inc., 2012, p. 65 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay "The key problem of Concrete art does not just involve color, but rather its infinite modulations." Ivan Serpa The art critic Frederico Morais considered Ivan Serpa’s Amazônica and Mangueira series of paintings to be undoubtedly Brazilian in their organic sensuality and palette. The Amazônica works were named after their exuberant green and brown hues, while the Mangueira series is largely greens and pinks, the colors of the Mangueira Samba School in Rio de Janeiro. The formal proximity between these two series is significant—it was with the carnival parades organized by Mangueira that artists such as Hélio Oiticica had become associated with throughout the 1960s, bringing these series of works into the context of the contemporaneous enthusiasm for all forms of popular culture. Morais further emphasized how these series marked a return to the constructivist vein within which Serpa had been such a prominent figure from the early 1950s onwards. For Morais, this phase in the artist’s trajectory that began around 1967 would find “original solutions of an optic or geometric character that resulted from a subtle game of poetic spatiality.” This analysis, which dates from the mid-1980s, finds a heightened significance today in our expanding understanding of Pop Art in a global context. Serpa proposes in these series of paintings not only a return to his former constructivist interests, now with a new “Brazilian” palette, but a reinterpretation of the significance of the Neo-Constructivist movements in light of the international rise of mass consumerist culture and the local popular traditions. If art concret proposed precise methods through which art and design could inform society at large, Serpa by the late 1960s was engaging not with the prospect of avant-garde art affecting the masses, but with the very fact. Ivan Serpa’s interest in geometric abstraction has been traced back to 1947 when together with fellow artists Almir Mavignier Abraham Palatnik and the art critic Mario Pedrosa, he participated in the art therapy workshops at the Psychiatric Hospital Engenho de Dentro in Rio de Janeiro. It has been increasingly acknowledged by prominent curators and art critics, such as Paulo Herkenhoff, that the mid-twentieth century rise of geometric abstraction in Brazil had its origins in the experience that these artists had with the work of the patients. A fact that corroborates this argument was Serpa’s early abstract canvases attracting attention during the first edition of the São Paulo Biennial in 1951 when he was awarded the young painter prize therefore contradicting the argument that abstract geometrical painting arrived in Brazil through the sole influence of Max Bill Given the prestige of the Biennial prize, it is perhaps not surprising that a significant group of artists in Rio de Janeiro gathered around Ivan Serpa to form the Grupo Frente around 1953. This was a loosely abstract geometric group whose members would later form the core of the Neoconcrete movement. These included Aluísio Carvão Lygia Clark Hélio Oiticica Lygia Pape Franz Weissmann amongst others. Throughout the 1950s Serpa worked as an artist while also holding a critical role as an art educator. Serpa’s open classes took place at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, transforming it into a progressive alternative to the then conservative art schools such as the National School of Fine Art (ENBA). Hélio Oiticica’s early work, for example, was very much influenced by Serpa’s teaching— this is particularly evident in Oiticica’s Grupo Frente work and in his subsequent Metaesquemas series where strong compositional associations between