Antonio Dias: Anywhere Is My Land

Brazilian artist Antonio Dias (born 1944) began making multimedia works in the mid-1960s, inspired in part by the prosaic subject matter and brash visual style of Pop art, and the wave of Neoconcrete art that exploded in Brazil contemporaneously with Pop. In his earliest paintings, Dias developed a fascinating amalgam of cartoonish brashness, occasional assemblage modifications and a distinctly Brazilian color palette, while his sculptures and installations simultaneously explored more austere, Malevichian realms, drawing in part on New York Minimalism. During Brazil's military dictatorship in the late 1960s, Dias left the country and moved to Europe, where he developed a style of conceptually oriented painting using words. Tracking Dias' five decades of production through works on paper, sculpture, painting, film and installation, this first English-language monograph on Dias reveals a hidden strain in Brazilian art to a wider public.