Antônio Dias in Milan

In 1969, less than a year after settling in Milan, Brazilian artist Antonio Dias joined an artist’s group named Art Terminal. The group was led by critic Tommaso Trini and, above all, by the multifaceted artist, theorist, and avant-garde musician Gianni-Emilio Simonetti – a Fluxus exponent in Italy who also had ties with the Situationist International. Despite its very short existence – the group only realized two happenings –, Art Terminal presented Dias with an alternative to the environmental art paradigm of the mid-1960s Rio de Janeiro avant-garde where he had first established himself. By paying attention both to works made in this period and to documents of his early interactions in Europe, this class will explore potential aesthetic implications of Dias’s negotiation with such markedly different paradigms.

Sérgio B. Martins is associate professor at the Department of History at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro and a CAPES/Humboldt Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin (2020-2022). He is the author of Constructing an Avant-Garde: Art in Brazil, 1949-1979 (MIT Press, 2013) and of numerous essays in exhibition catalogues such as Hélio Oiticica: to Organize Delirium (Carnegie Museum, 2017), Cildo Meireles (Reina Sofia, 2013), Anna Maria Maiolino (MoCA, 2017), Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture (Tate Modern, 2015) and Lygia Pape: a Multitude of Forms (The Metropolitan Museum, 2017), as well as articles in magazines and journals such as Artforum, October, ARTMargins, ARS, MODOS, Novos Estudos and Third Text. His current book project focuses on the transnational trajectory of Brazilian artist Antonio Dias after he moved first to Paris and then to Milan in the late 1960s.