Just over a century ago, a symbolic watershed moment put Brazil on the map of modernity: the historic 1922 Modern Art Week. Subsequent events paved the way for more modern art visionaries who ushered in contemporary experimentalism. The Vectors exhibition pays tribute to some of those foretellers.

Divided into three clusters, Vectors spans two spaces at the Almeida & Dale headquarters on Rua Fradique Coutinho. The first cluster, dedicated to sculpture, features work by Brecheret (1894-1955), Ernesto De Fiori (1884-1945), José Damasceno (1968), José Resende (1945), Lygia Pape (1927-2004), Nelson Felix (1954), Sergio Camargo (1930-1990), Sérvulo Esmeraldo (1929-2017), Tunga (1952-2016), and Willys de Castro (1926-2012).

The second cluster, focused on painting, includes more household names: Aluísio Carvão (1920-2001), Arcangelo Ianelli (1922-2009), Cássio Michalany (1949-2024), Dudi Maia Rosa (1946), Eduardo Sued (1925), Eleonore Koch (1926-2018), Frank Stella (1936-2024), Judith Lauand (1922-2022), Lucio Fontana (1899-1968), Luiz Sacilotto (1924-2003), Lothar Charoux (1912-1987), Mira Schendel (1919-1988), Paulo Pasta (1959), Rodrigo Andrade (1962), and Volpi (1896-1988).

Lastly, for the third cluster (photography, engraving), Miguel Rio Branco (1946) leads a trio featuring Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980) and Hiroshi Sugimoto (1948).

Beyond the collection of important names, Vectors reveals the resonance of modernist output among Brazilian and non-Brazilian contemporaries.

Thus, one can liken movements such as Brazilian neo-concretism and the “spatialism” invented by Italian-Argentinian Lucio Fontana. The result of research initiated in the 1940s, his revolutionary incisions on canvases in the 1950s did not go unnoticed by the neo-concretes during the process of breaking the barrier of bi-dimensionality. Certainly, both Lygia Pape and Hélio Oiticica, took similar approaches in leaving the plane and conquering space.

And what to say of the painter Judith Lauand, the only woman in the groundbreaking São Paulo-based group Ruptura (Rupture, created in 1952), who, like other independent artists, such as Mira Schendel and Eleonore Koch, paved the way for a generation of contemporary young painters?

Another Ruptura member, Luiz Sacilotto, a forerunner of concretism in the 1940s, before the concrete group even existed, is featured in the exhibition alongside other veteran painters who embraced abstractionism, a case in point being Arcangelo Ianelli. Dominating the scene is Volpi, an unavoidable reference for everyone, including the post-80s Generation contemporary painters.

Also in the field of painting, we have Frank Stella from the United States, whose Black Paintings (1958) played a key role in so-called “new abstraction” in the USA, ushering in a decisive movement for the renewal of art syntax, minimalism, in the United States. Stella is featured with a sculptural piece from the Hacilar Level IIA series, inspired by neolithic artworks found in Turkey.

This straddling of different periods in history is not unique to Frank Stella. Another painter who is also open to this dialogue is Paulo Pasta, whose compendium of Western painting both evokes the color of pre-Renaissance artists and embodies the libertarian spirit of his contemporaries, as he travels past the borders between centuries. Other names could be mentioned, but Pasta does a good job of summing up the question at the heart of Vectors, namely to establish an intimate connection between artists from different generations.