Ernesto Neto

Ernesto Neto creates sculptures and sculptural environments that often involve non-traditional artistic techniques and materials, such as stretchy and semi-translucent fabrics, cushions and crochet, aromatic spices and music. Neto's work addresses the entire body of the viewer and makes the viewer an active and autonomous participant in the experience of the artwork.

Neto’s best-known works are his large-scale, immersive environments, often populated by amorphously pendulous forms, which often create an atmosphere of playful irreverence that nods to the Brazilian Neo-Concrete movement and other avant-garde movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Although generally composed of abstract, seemingly simple forms, in fact in these works Neto carefully employs materials in ways that allow them to express their innate qualities while also interacting with their architectural surroundings, inventively yet with great delicacy.

Neto’s most recent work has been inspired by materials from indigenous cultures in Brazil, incorporating shamanism, cosmology and belief systems, collaborative works, and perception-altering practices. As in her intensely tactile yet intensely visual sculptural work, viewers are simultaneously inside and outside, heightening the body’s perceptual relationship to the space around it and ultimately to itself.

Visit the Ernesto Neto exhibition at the Elba Benitez Gallery, click on the image

The deceptively simple works in the exhibition, or segredo eo encuentro, manifest Ernesto Neto's characteristic methodology, which, using a minimum of means, imparts a heightened phenomenological experience to the viewer. And, on another level, these works reference a spiritual aspect that underlies all of Neto's practice, symbolizing the mind's union of the known and the unknown in what we experience as perception and consciousness, a union that extends even to the vastest cosmological mysteries of existence, time, and creation.

Ernesto Neto has held solo exhibitions at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo (2019), MALBA - Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (2019), TBA21 - ThyssenBornemisza Art Contemporary (Vienna, 2015), Guggenheim Bilbao (2014), MoMA - The Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2010), MOMAT – The National Museum of Modern Art (Tokyo, 2004), Kunsthalle Basel (2002), among others. He has been invited to participate in numerous biennials and important international exhibitions, including the São Paulo Biennial (2010, 1998) and La Biennale di Venezia (2001).