She specializes in modern and contemporary Brazilian art, with a special focus on its relationship with photography. Heloisa Espada is curator at Instituto Moreira Salles, Brazil. This program is organized in conjunction with “From Surface to Space”: Max Bill and Concrete Sculpture in Buenos Aires, curated by Francesca Ferrari, at ISLAA, a complementary exhibition to max b ill g lobal at the Zentrum Paul Klee.įor information about the related panel International Dialogues in Experimental Design, presented by the Zentrum Paul Klee and ISLAA on October 14, please visit this link. It disputes the straightforward conflation of Bill’s approach to form with that of his counterparts in the region and reassesses Bill’s interest in mathematical structures in terms of irregular, non-Euclidean notions of space and the viewer’s sensory activation.Īfter Francesca Ferrari introduces her research for the exhibition “From Surface to Space”: Max Bill and Concrete Sculpture in Buenos Aires at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), Heloisa Espada will discuss the contradictions between Bill’s positions and the narratives that describe him as a propagator of strict ideas about concrete art in her lecture “Max Bill: Radical for Whom?” Adele Nelson will then present her talk “Max Bill or Bust: Complicating Brazilian Concretism,” which will reveal how form, as conceived by Brazilian thinkers and makers, stood counter to Bill’s thinking and instead signaled an innovative merging of media. This panel challenges these assumptions, recasting Bill’s role in the shaping of Latin American concretism and reassessing his contributions in light of his Brazilian and Argentine peers’ interpretation of concrete art. This narrative, which pervades the literature on the history of concretism in the region, consistently casts Bill as a staunch defender of rationalism and even as the harbinger of a certain formal rigidity. The Swiss artist Max Bill has long been understood as a principal source for the theory and practice of Latin American abstract artists in the 1940s and 1950s, especially in Brazil and Argentina. A recording will be available for streaming online after the event takes place. This program will be conducted in English and presented live on Zoom. Presented in collaboration with The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU