Nelson Leirner – ENG
Biography
Nelson Leirner was born in São Paulo in 1932. he is an intermedia artist. From 1947 to 1952, he lived in the United States, where he studied textile engineering at the Lowell Technological Institute, in Massachusetts, leaving before completion. On returning to Brazil, he studied painting under Joan Ponç (1927 – 1984), in 1956, and briefly attended the Atelier-Abstração [Studio-Abstraction], of Flexor (1907 – 1971), in 1958. In 1966, he founded the Grupo Rex [Rex Group], together with Wesley Duke Lee (1931), Geraldo de Barros (1923 – 1998), Carlos Fajardo (1941), José Resende (1945) and Frederico Nasser (1945). In 1967, he held the Exhibition-Non-Exhibition event, a happening that marked the end of the group, in which he offered his works for free to the public.
In the same year, he sent a stuffed pig to the 4th Modern Art Salon of Brasília and publicly questioned, through the Jornal da Tarde [Evening Newspaper], the standards of judgment that led the jury to accept the work. He produced his first multiples, with canvas and zipper mounted on a frame. He was also one of the first artists to use billboards as supports for artworks. For political reasons, he closed the special room dedicated to him at the 10th Bienal Internacional de São Paulo [São Paulo International Biennial], in 1969, and turned down an invitation for the 1971 edition. In the 1970s, he created allegories of the contemporary political scene in a series of drawings and engravings. In 1974, he exhibited the series, A Rebelião dos Animais [The Rebellion of the Animals], with works harshly criticizing the military regime, for which he was awarded a prize from the São Paulo Art Critics Association – APCA, for best proposal of the year. In 1975, the APCA commissioned him a work to be delivered as a prize to recipients but it was rejected on the grounds that it had been made in Xerox, leading artists to skip the ceremony in protest.
From 1977 to 1997, he taught at the Armando Álvares Penteado Foundation – Faap, in São Paulo, where he played a significant role in the education of several generations of artists. He moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1997, supervising the basic course of the Visual Arts School of the Lage Park – EAV/Parque Lage, until the following year.
He is the author of a multifaceted, even polymorphic work: drawings, objects, multiples, stamps, billboards, performances and happenings, which, in none of its forms, loses critical density. His work is characterized by the use of canonical works of art history as well as the imagery of pop culture.
His work has also been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Museu de Arte Moderna de Sao Paulo (MAM), Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Centre Pompidou – Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris.
He is represented nationally and internationally in important public collections:
São Paulo Museum of Art, São Paulo, Brazil
Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
Museum of Contemporary Art of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
Rio de Janeiro Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Niterói Museum of Contemporary Art, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Museum of Art of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil
Oscar Niemeyer Museum, Curitiba, Brazil
Aloísio Magalhães Museum of Modern Art, Recife, Brazil
Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
Banco Itaú S.A., São Paulo, Brazil
Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, USA
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, USA
La Maison Rouge, Paris, France
João Satamini collection, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
The Gilberto Chateaubriand collection, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Daros Latin America collection, Zurich, Switzerland
The Patricia Phelps de Cisneros collection, Caracas, Venezuela
Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami, USA
Caixa Geral de Depósitos, Lisbon, Portugal
Inhotim Contemporary Art Center, Minas Gerais, Brazil
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)