Ernesto Neto

Ernesto Neto creates sculptures and sculptural environments that often involve non-traditional artistic techniques and materials, such as stretch and semi-translucent fabrics, cushions and crochet, aromatic spices and music. Neto's work addresses the totality of the viewer's body and makes the viewer an active and autonomous participant in the experience of the artwork.

Neto's best known works are his large-scale, enveloping environments, often populated by amorphously pendulous forms that often create an atmosphere of playful irreverence, hinting at the Brazilian neo-concrete and other avant-garde movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Although generally composed of abstract and seemingly simple forms, Neto actually employs materials carefully in these works in a way that allows them to express their innate qualities and at the same time interact with their architectural surroundings, inventively but with great delicacy.

Neto's most recent work has been inspired by materials from Brazil's indigenous cultures, incorporating shamanism, cosmology and belief systems, collaborative works and perception-altering practices. As in his sculptural work, intensely tactile yet intensely visual, viewers are simultaneously inside and outside, heightening the body's perceptual relationship to the surrounding space and, ultimately, to itself.

Visit the exhibition of Ernesto Neto at Galería Elba Benitez, click on the image

The deceptively simple works in the exhibition o segredo e o encontro, manifest Ernesto Neto's characteristic methodology that, using a minimum of means, imparts an intensified phenomenological experience to the viewer. And, on another level, these works refer to a spiritual aspect that underlies all of Neto's practice, symbolising the mind's union of the known and the unknown in what we experience as perception and consciousness, a union that extends even to the larger cosmological mysteries of existence, time and creation.

Ernesto Neto has had solo exhibitions at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo (2019), MALBA - Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (2019), TBA21 - ThyssenBornemisza Art Contemporary (Vienna, 2015), Guggenheim Bilbao (2014), MoMA - The Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2010), MOMAT - The National Museum of Modern Art (Tokyo, 2004), Kunsthalle Basel (2002), among others. He has been invited to participate in numerous biennials and important international exhibitions, including the São Paulo Biennial (2010, 1998) and La Biennale di Venezia (2001).