Related Mário Pedrosa

In Brazil, in 1959, the International Congress of Art Critics was held, a symposium where artists, architects, art and architectural historians were brought together to debate the role of modernity in a new world surfacing in the post-war period. This new reading of the minutes sets out to activate the document, understood as a performative exercise of a past utopian episode that still has huge potency and resonates in a present time in which art history and critique have been displaced from their role and public influence.

This activity introduces the thinking of the Brazilian intellectual inside the space of the retrospective dedicated to his work. The talk seeks to disseminate his main ideas in connection with the artists and works that accompany his reflections. Mário Pedrosa (Pernambuco, 1900 – Rio de Janeiro, 1981) was a tireless critic and historian and the author of a unique concept of modernity, whereby art, as he put it, is the “experimental exercise of freedom”.

This seminar, comprised of a series of lectures, addresses the transformations and surveys of modern utopia in post-war abstraction between Latin America and Eastern Europe.