Hélio Oiticica (193-1980) was one of the most innovative Brazilian artists of the twentieth century and is now recognised as a highly significant figure in the development of contemporary art. His influence has continued to spread since his premature death in 1980 at the age of forty-two.



Oiticica produced an outstanding body of work, which had its origins in the legacy of European Modernism as it developed in Brazil in the 1950s. His unique and radical investigations led him to develop his artistic production in ever more inventive directions. He challenged the traditional boundaries of art, and its relationship with life, and undermined the separation of the art-object from the viewer, whom he turned into an active participant.



This is the first major museum exhibition to focus exclusively on Oiticica's lifelong preoccupation with colour. It explores colour as a vital focus of his work from the outset of his career, tracing the conceptual and technical processes that led to his liberation of colour from the two-dimensional realm of painting out into space: to be walked around and through, looked into, manipulated, inhabited and experienced.