Neo-Concrete Movement

"At the heart of the Neo-Concretist movement [...] was the notion that art should be physically experienced."

- Elisa Wouk Almino, Contemporary Brazilian Artists at Home with Neo-Concretists, Hyperallergic, 2015.

"The Neo-Concrete Movement was a Brazilian art movement, which developed from a coalition of artists working in Concrete Art. Neo-Concrete artists rejected the pure rationalist approach of concrete art and embraced a more phenomenological and less scientific art....Concrete Art was able to flourish beneath ... repressive [political] regimes because it held no political messages or incendiary material. ... The Neo-Concrete Art Movement arose when [the artists] realized that Concretism was 'naïve and somewhat colonialist' and an 'overly rational conception of abstract structure.'", Wikipedia

"Artists from Rio de Janeiro [...] became more and more interested in experimenting with a wide range of color and inserting a greater sensuality or poetic feeling into their art. Ultimately, [Neo-Concrete artists...] went on to develop methods of creating art that embraced notions of performative interactivity between the art object and the spectator."

- Edward J. Sullivan, "Neo-Concrete Art" from "Brazil Body & Soul" Guggenheim exhibition catalog

"Neo-concrete artworks usually required the viewer's active participation. It is through the presence and participation of the viewer that the artwork becomes complete.", Lygia Pape, Wikipedia

Lygia Clark, Poetic Shelter (1960). "In 1960 Clark began to produce movable metal sculptures that could be modified by the spectator from three–dimensional planes to flat reliefs"

Lygia Clark, The Inside Is the Outside (1963)

Lygia Pape, Tteia,(1979),  Lygia Pape, Magnetized Space (2011)

EL-you Oh-tee-see-kah

Hélio Oiticica, Os Parangolés (1964)

"I need to clarify my interest in dance, in rhytm, which in my particular case came from a vital necessity for disintellecturalization.... This was teh definite step towards teh search for myth, for a reappraisal of this myth and a new foundation in my art... it was the beginning of a definitive social experience;", Hélio Oiticica, Dance in My Experience (Diary Entries), 1965, (from Documents on Contemporary Art: Participation) 

Hélio Oiticica, Tropicalia (1967)

"In 1965, when he tried to do a performance at Rio’s Museum of Modern Art with Mangueira dancers clad in his capes, they were denied entry.... Tropicália was conceived in 1966. In a way, it was engineered to infiltrate the very museum that had turned away those dancers a year before: 'the created environment,' he wrote of Tropicália, 'was obviously tropical, evoking a small plot of land; but more importantly, you would have the feeling of actually walking on the earth. This was the same sensation I had felt earlier walking among the hills, of entering and leaving the favelas. Turning along the informal structures of Tropicália brings back memories of those hills.'", Brooklyn Rail

Hélio Oiticica, Eden, 1969

"Eden is studded with pavilions and pods and objects that you may explore: tents containing fragrant leaves, jagged rocks, and running water to wash your feet in; a cocoon-like sleeping platform; lumber “nests” that you can crawl around in, filled with hay, shredded Styrofoam mulch, and even a bunch of used books to peruse.... “Today’s world demands something improvised and participatory,” he wrote. “People are able to create things themselves instead of submitting to models. So the artist has to propose things which people themselves can create.”", Brooklyn Rail

Lygia Clark, The I and the You: Clothing-Body-Clothing Series, 1967

Lygia Clark, "Sensorial Masks" (1967)

"soft masks with spices in them and mirrored goggles that let you see yourself"

Lygia Clark, "Biological Architectures 1," 1968.

Lygia Clark, “A casa é o corpo: penetração, ovulação, germinação, expulsão” (“The House is the Body: penetration, ovulation, germination, expulsion”), 1968

"'The house was more than a skin … an organism as alive as our own,' Lygia Clark wrote soon after making the interactive installation.... Encased inside a giant plastic balloon resembling a womb, the viewer entered a dark interior and brushed against soft surfaces before emerging back into the light", Contemporary Brazilian Artists at Home with Neo-Concretists, Hyperallergic

Lygia Clark, “Couple”, 1969.