Exhibitions
Malba presents Pop Brasil, an exhibition that revives the energy of Brazilian art under the dictatorship
The Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (Malba) presents Pop Brazil: Avant-garde and New Figuration, 1960s-70s , an exhibition that brings together more than 120 works by 50 Brazilian artists, protagonists of one of the most vibrant and contradictory stages of the 20th century in Brazil with pieces from the Pinacoteca de São Paulo and from outstanding private collections, such as that of Roger Wright —one of the most important dedicated to the artistic production of the 1960s and 1970s—, in addition to the collections of Malba and Eduardo F. Costantini.
Wanda Pimentel. Envolvimento Series, 1968. Malba Collection.
Curated by Yuri Quevedo and Pollyana Quintella, the exhibition explores the intersections of art, politics, and popular culture during the years of the military dictatorship (1964-1985). Through paintings, objects, installations, and graphic works, Pop Brasil reveals how a generation of artists transformed the tensions of their time into a powerful, ironic, and profoundly critical visual language.
A new temporal itinerary invites visitors to rediscover the experimental energy and defiant perspective that defined a key artistic movement in the history of Latin American art, coinciding with the visit of international singer Dua Lipa at the opening of this temporary exhibition at the Buenos Aires museum. More than a review of the past, the exhibition offers a reflection on the ways in which pop culture, censorship, and modernization shaped Brazilian identity and its collective imagination.
Among the artists present are essential figures of the period such as Anna Bella Geiger, Antônio Dias, Claudio Tozzi, Hélio Oiticica, Mira Schendel, Rubens Gerchman, Wanda Pimentel and Wesley Duke Lee, whose works show the aesthetic diversity and experimental force that defined Brazilian art of those years.
Pop Brasil focuses on the radical way in which Brazilian artists engaged with the everyday life of their time, producing works that rethought the relationship of the body with protest, popular culture, gender politics, public space, the domestic sphere and consumption.
The exhibition also explores the dialogues that, during the 1960s and 1970s, the visual arts established with other disciplines such as music and film, in a context of intense experimentation and cultural resistance.
Through this journey, Pop Brasil invites the public to experience the transformative power of those proposals and to understand the historical connections that defined one of the most vibrant stages of Latin American art.
