How Brazilian postwar avant-garde artists updated modernism in a way that was radically at odds with European and North American art historical narratives. Brazilian avant-garde artists of the postwar era worked from a fundamental but productive out-of-jointness. They were modernist but distant from modernism. Europeans and North Americans may feel a similar displacement when viewing Brazilian avant-garde art; the unexpected familiarity of the works serves to make them unfamiliar. In Constructing an Avant-Garde, S廨gio Martins seizes on this uncanny obliqueness and uses it as the basis for a reconfigured account of the history of Brazil's avant-garde. His discussion covers not only widely renowned artists and groups--including H幨io Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Cildo Meireles, and neoconcretism--but also important artists and critics who are less well known outside Brazil, including M嫫io Pedrosa, Ferreira Gullar, Am璱car de Castro, Lu疄 Sacilotto, Antonio Dias, and Rubens Gerchman. Martins
Born in Calabria, Italy, in 1942, Anna Maria Maiolino is one of the leading artists of her generation. Her work reflects the major cultural and political realities of postwar Europe and South America
