Paulo Bruscky
A key participant in the international mail-art movement and associated with Fluxus, Paulo Brusky investigates meaning through action, collage, installation, film, and poetry. His work reflects a simultaneous engagement with both the local artistic framework of Recife, Brazil and a global network, which he documents in artist’s books, performative projects, and photographs. Belonging to a lineage of artists who engage with textual or literary sources that includes Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, Bruscky engages in various forms of wordplay. In the 1970s and ’80s, for example, he published a series of classified ads in newspapers in Brazil and elsewhere advocating absurdist or impossible situations.
Artearonimbo
(1974), published in the Brazilian newspaper
Diario de Pernambuco
, calls for “a chemist, meteorologist, or anyone capable of coloring a cloud.”
Bruscky’s unique brand of visual poetry demonstrates a fluidity between art and life that exploits the context of urban routine. Through interventions on the streets of major cities the artist acts out imaginative scenarios that range from the humorously absurd to the seemingly mundane. In the action
O que e arte? Para que serve?
(
What is art? What is it for?
(1978), the artist played the part of a mannequin in a …
A key participant in the international mail-art movement and associated with Fluxus, Paulo Brusky investigates meaning through action, collage, installation, film, and poetry. His work reflects a simultaneous engagement with both the local artistic framework of Recife, Brazil and a global network, which he documents in artist’s books, performative projects, and photographs. Belonging to a lineage of artists who engage with textual or literary sources that includes Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, Bruscky engages in various forms of wordplay. In the 1970s and ’80s, for example, he published a series of classified ads in newspapers in Brazil and elsewhere advocating absurdist or impossible situations.
Artearonimbo
(1974), published in the Brazilian newspaper
Diario de Pernambuco
, calls for “a chemist, meteorologist, or anyone capable of coloring a cloud.”
Bruscky’s unique brand of visual poetry demonstrates a fluidity between art and life that exploits the context of urban routine. Through interventions on the streets of major cities the artist acts out imaginative scenarios that range from the humorously absurd to the seemingly mundane. In the action
O que e arte? Para que serve?
(
What is art? What is it for?
(1978), the artist played the part of a mannequin in a library window, physically negotiating the divides between art, knowledge, and public space. In another work,
PostAction
(1971), the artist performed a procession from a bookstore to Recife’s central post office carrying a giant envelope to commemorate “the end of mail art.”
Bruscky has had solo exhibitions at Espao Cultural Sérgio Porto in Rio de Janeiro, Centro Cultural Usina do Gasmetro in Porto Alegre, Museu de Arte Contempornea da Universidade de São Paulo, Museu de Arte da Pampulha in Belo Horizonte, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York, among other institutions. His work has appeared in group exhibitions internationally, at venues including Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Museu de Arte Moderna Aloísio Magalhes in Recife, and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid. He was a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982.
Courtesy of the Guggenheim Museum
MoMA, New York, NY
Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY
Tate Gallery, London, England
Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Holland
Carbono Galeria, São Paulo, Brazil