Carlito carvalhosa biography

Carlito Carvalhosa, a Brazilian artist with a loyal following in his home country, has died at 59. Folha de S.Paulo reported that Carvalhosa died on May 13 of intestinal cancer.

In a statement, Galeria Nara Roesler, which represents the artist, wrote, “Brazilian art has lost a fundamental figure of the period between centuries, but the world gains an immeasurable artistic legacy that it is our responsibility to keep alive, to continue interpreting, and to place on the international level that it deserves.”

Carvalhosa was among the most widely acclaimed contemporary artists in Brazil, though his art had rarely been seen outside the country until the past decade. In his striking paintings, sculptures, and installations, which he first began creating in the 1980s, Carvalhosa altered viewers’ perceptions of gallery spaces, adapting the visual languages of Neo-Concretism and Minimalism for a new generation.

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Born in São Paulo in 1961, Carvalhosa was a founder of the influential Casa 7 group, which also included Paulo Monteiro, Nuno Ramos, Fábio Miguez, and Rodrigo Andrade. Based in São Paulo’s Pinheiros neighborhood, the artist group staked a claim for the relevancy of painting during the 1980s, at a time when the medium was believed to have grown outmoded. Members worked under the sign of Philip Guston, producing dark, foreboding images that existed somewhere between figuration and abstraction.

In his solo practice, Carvalhosa drew on work by Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, and others. In 2011, for his first North American one-person show, he brought the installation Sum of Days to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. (A version of it had premiered at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo the year before.) During the course of the presentation’s run, a translucent white cloth floated above the museum

At two venues in São Paulo, the grandiose tribute with paintings, sculptures and installations to Carlito Carvalhosa (1961-2021) is December’s must-see retrospective of contemporary art by the late Brazilian artist. At Instituto Tomie Ohtake, “A metade do dobro” (Half of Double), concentrates on his paintings and sculptures, from his early neo-expressionist narrative to the conceptual plunge of his later works. The bulk of his impressive, large-sized installations occupy the entire exhibition space at Sesc Pompeia in “A Natureza das Coisas” (The Nature of Things). Stunning!

Carlito Carvalhosa began at the same time that young artists in Rio and São Paulo permanently buried the geometrical precision and rules of Concrete art with paint splashed on unframed canvases or kraft paper as a clarion call for a new road to Brazilian art. With Neo-Expressionism as their banner, they brought back Figurativism in raw, expressive brushstrokes in large-scale, pop narrative imagery, capturing the hopeful zeitgeist of mid-1980s Brazil’s transition from the two-decade suffocating military regime to democracy.

Opinionated, knowledgeable on art, charming, tall, handsome, and a firm believer in his work, he was the whole package, soon the local art world and media were hailing the young creative. Looking back, the journey to the top of Brazilian art was a swift one for the middle-class guy with a supportive intellectual mother he loved—founder of a respected publishing house—and an absent father, but he had, above all, the trait that gives perpetuation to artists: true talent. In the nineties, his quest for

It is with great sadness that Nara Roesler announces the passing of artist Carlito Carvalhosa (1961-2021), who leaves behind an immense and significant body of work. Carvalhosa was born in 1961, in São Paulo. In the early 1980s, he took on, with his colleagues from the Casa 7 Group, the great task of embracing another renewal of painting as a genre. It was up to this generation to reinvent the possibility of art after the sublime exhaustion undertaken by the previous generation. Carvalhosa attributed profound eloquence to the materiality of the support, while also transcending  in addressing broader issues, such as the transformations of space and time.

Carlito's work involved painting, sculpture, installation and performance. In his practice, we encounter tensions between form and matter, made explicit in dialogues between the visible, the subtle, the tactile. In the 1990s, he dedicated himself to the production of sculptures with an organic and malleable appearance, using different materials, such as his lost waxes. His practice expanded in the 2000s, occupying space with installations that dialogue profoundly with architecture, the landscape and the history of each place. Sound was also a central element in his investigations, in collaborations with musicians like Philip Glass and Arto Lindsay, or in performances like rio (2014) in which Carlito created a cacophony from the text My sweet river, by Lygia Clark.

“His work tells us that he knew how to embody the great legacy of modernity in Rio, that of Oiticica, Clark, Pape and Pedrosa, bringing it forward to the 21st century. In his work, the mystery of the affectivity of forms acquired a monumental dimension, an unprecedented territory, an inexhaustible expanded field. In other words, it was up to him – and this is one of the keys of his legacy – to create an encounter between the lesson of non-art and the infinite life of art, in order to re-inaugurat

The Brazilian artist Carlito Carvalhosa, a prolific and multi-faceted painter and sculptor, has died, aged 59. He died on 13 May at the Nova Star Hospital in São Paulo. He was one of the founding members of the influential Brazilian art collective Casa 7 and was the first living Brazilian artist to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

Carvalhosa was born in 1961 in São Paulo and studied architecture and urbanism at the University of São Paulo, during which he also studied metal engraving with the artist Sérgio Fingermann. In the 1980s, he founded Casa 7 along with Paulo Monteiro, Nuno Ramos, Fabio Miguez and Rodrigo Andrade. The group produced paintings influenced by Neo-Expressionism and Constructivism.

In the late 1980s, as the group disbanded, Carvalhosa received a scholarship from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst and lived in Cologne until 1992. He began experimenting with encaustics and creating sculptural paintings made from wax and malleable materials . His long-time dealer Nara Roesler organised an exhibition in New York that revisited these minimalist pieces in 2019. In a statement, Roesler says Carvalhosa’s work was “always restless, experimental and enigmatic”.

Throughout his career, the artist also experimented with other mediums, including porcelain works and large-scale sculptures made with industrial materials, as well as paintings with mirrored surfaces.

Carvalhosa participated in several major exhibitions in his lifetime, including the São Paulo Biennial in 1985, the Havana Biennial in 1986 and the Mercosul Biennial in 2009 and 2011. His work is included in various significant collections, including the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, the Pinacoteca de São Paulo and the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation in Miami.

Carvalhosa's 2011 exhibition at MoMA he showed the installation Sum of