Henrique Oliveira (Ourinhos - SP, 1973)
Lives and works in São Paulo
Aracy Amaral - The Urban Art of Henrique Oliveira (2011)
My first contact with Henrique Oliveira's environmental poetics took place in Ibirapuera Park, during the Paralela event of the Bienal de São Paulo, in 2006. The audacity of the scale and the tumultuous forces of his forms within conventional space struck me at once, setting his work forcefully apart from that of the other participants. It was love at first sight, owing to the sweeping movement of the forms and their aggressive roughness. Later I was able to see his works, both installations and paintings, in solo shows in São Paulo, and since then I have followed his rapid trajectory. At that time I still regarded with some suspicion a certain parallelism that I seemed to perceive between his paintings and his installations. How could one establish a link between these two forms of expression - one painting, the other vigorously three-dimensional? Despite my difficulty, the "conversation" was clearly visible between the broad, swirling brushstrokes and the almost dancing palette-knife strokes of acrylic on the two-dimensional surface, and the colored slabs of bent, overlapping plywood strips in his installations. If the paintings captivate us like magnified marbled endpapers of precious books, they attract us visually as projections of masses, incandescent magmas suspended for a split second, the agitation captured by Oliveira matching the whirlwind of his three-dimensional works. Today I see with some clarity two moments in the trajectory of this artist - who still has an almost adolescent appearance (!) - and who seems absorbed by his work day and night: one moment, which he calls "Tapumes" [Hoardings], because he uses the material of the plywood fences that enclose construction sites on the streets of Brazilian cities. These "tapumes" are objects meant to cover, like modern painting, as he himself points out, without illusion of depth, implying the principle of flatness, and then painted in a somewhat watery manner, without much formal concern but with a very great force in their wrenched, "torn" movements. This is Oliveira's phase of self-affirmation, when the violently swelling waves of his surfaces suggest the most thrilling ride for the daring surfer. Organic, always true tsunamis, owing to the near vertigo of his environments. It is the phase built from scraps, refuse gathered, sought out, found and assembled in his installations.
Henrique Oliveira is definitely an artist of the generation fully immersed in urban, suburban, peripheral consumption, as his materials and the way he uses them - and discards them after their presentation at events or exhibitions - make clear. His first powerful installations were set on the wall, or the partition, or later, at the Mercosul Biennial (2009), brutally constructed, as if glued, onto the façade of an early 20th-century house in Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil. In a second moment of his trajectory, the sculptural object emerges, as a natural development in the sequence of solo exhibitions, alongside installation and painting, as an offshoot of the three-dimensional wall works. When geometric elements are inserted and coupled to the body of the piece (a rational form in contrast to the visceral brutality of the context - as in "Caçambocitose" -), he calls it "Boxoplasmose", like the work he presents in this exhibition. Incidentally, the nomenclature Henrique Oliveira uses is peculiar, since the artist resorts to titles that refer to the medical sciences, such as "Xilonoma Chamusquius", to refer humorously, in a pseudoscientific way, to a tumor of charred wood. This attraction to the "scientific" also leads him to look for shapes for his three-dimensional objects by leafing through the Atlas of Gross Pathology. Thus, he does not consider himself bereft of influences. He himself readily acknowledges his admiration for Willem de Kooning and Frank Auerbach, the latter above all in his "Xilempastos", the name he gives to wooden panels in which the volumes are built "taking as a model the textures of paintings, in particular oil impasto", inspired by Auerbach (artist's statement to the author, June 24, 2011). And he adds, in the same statement: "The idea behind these works of mine is that of 'impastos' made of wood, a combination of two opposing elements in a single image: soft, fluid paste and hard, dried-out wood". At the same time, the importance of drawing in Henrique Oliveira's universe must be stressed.
In this artist, the graphic record anticipates, in particular, his three-dimensional works. It is his poetic side par excellence, a purposeful line that sensitively shapes the compositions being planned, proving that mental exercise foresees the movements and form of the pieces to be developed. Thus, in recent years, Oliveira's working process has changed. Before, it was refuse. Today, "construction" material stands out in his creations. What might have changed? In fact, refuse has given way to "urban epidermis". The most strident, torn installations are gradually giving way to constructions with more modeled forms. This without altering the fact that, as he says, his work is always "about creating tension in space", and lies halfway "between painting, architecture and sculpture" (interview with Kimberly Davenport, Rice Gallery, Houston, 2009). In other words, he relates to each of these arts in his need to "find the limits of space". But the current process already follows a system: after the preparatory drawings, he sets up the framework and begins the composition with flexible plywood and screws, before covering the piece with glue-soaked cardboard. The visible strips of plywood or ribbons of thin flexible plywood - that is, new industrial material and no longer just construction refuse - are stapled with glue onto the structures, the staples being removed once the glue has dried. Oliveira stresses the hybrid nature of the materials that characterizes this current phase: "The wood veneers that cover these pieces are still collected from the trash.
What has changed from the beginning of the Tapumes installations to today is the additional use of construction elements that have given me greater control and plasticity to develop more complex forms. The PVC pipes, the cardboard, the glue, the screws and above all the flexible plywood - these are indeed new industrial materials. They are used to build the pieces, since the used plywood veneers only come in at the end, covering everything like an 'urban epidermis'" (statement cited above). Another relevant point that draws our attention is his ability to take on a space, the freedom to think "macro", to conceive its transfiguration through projects such as the one for the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, 2010), or his insertion into/fusion with architecture (Monterrey Biennial, 2009). Or again, when he demonstrates the fusion of his chromatic painting/three-dimensional delusions (Rice Gallery, Houston, 2009). And color? How does visible paint come to these undulating, visceral or baroque forms? Well, the painter's palette is on the ground, as he says, on the floor, neatly laid out in strips, the color being picked by the artist as the assembly of the piece progresses. Hence, we conclude, one of his greatest difficulties is probably deciding when the work is finished. We have mentioned that we consider Oliveira an eminently urban artist.
Because of the constructive character of his work, while at the same time displaying an aggressive organicity that attracted us from the very first moment, he stands apart from the weary concrete/neoconcrete/conceptual academy in which Brazilian art has been so steeped since the 1950s-60s, even today. At the same time, through the scale and the manual execution of his broad, spatial works, he seems distant from his Brazilian contemporaries. Although a graduate of a visual arts school where teachers with formalist rather than expressive leanings clearly predominate, there is an architectural-constructive content in his conceptions that recalls the plastic audacity of a Frank Gehry, while his recourse to and manipulation of discarded materials seem to point to a certain affinity with "arte povera", specifically urban art like that of Jacques Villeglé or Mimmo Rotella in the 1960s. We are talking about a very young artist, with a dynamic trajectory, from a country that is open and eager for the new. Henrique Oliveira analyzes space and populates it, deconstructing it passionately. And with heterogeneous techniques and materials he rebuilds that space with an unusual charge of energy, in constantly mutating forms. Isn't that a fine wager? AMARAL, Aracy: "A Arte Urbana de Henrique Oliveira". Text published in the catalog of the exhibition Henrique Oliveira, Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois, Paris, 2011.
Ricardo Resende - Tapumes [Hoardings] (2010)
Taking a pause to reflect on which direction to take in life, the artist Henrique Oliveira, after a period in São Paulo, where he studied social communication at the Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing, returned to his hometown, Ourinhos, in the interior of the state of São Paulo, and set up a studio next to his father's half-abandoned carpentry shop. This change took place in 1997, the year he decided to devote himself to painting. But how does one decide to be a painter? What leads a person to call himself an artist and then become a painter? And, finally, to claim that his painting is art? These questions were posed by Richard Wollheim in the book Painting as an Art. According to the author, painting lies in "certain acts of painting. Acts that would create certain particular paintings". The title of the book alludes, according to Wollheim, "to the different ways in which people paint... And what makes a painting a painting is what the artist does and not what he says". Henrique Oliveira has a very particular way of painting, which makes him a painter. Whether what he does is painting is not, in this case, for him to say. And it is this particular way of working, or his artistic process, that makes what he does a very special kind of painting. Not at all conventional. This would justify the development of his visual research, which has wood as the material of his installations and which I dare to call paintings. It is not paint, but the scraps of wood themselves that give color to his "paintings". Woods that bear the discoloration of time. They become paintings that do not stay on the flatness of a canvas. They are works of engineering of complex pictoriality and consequent visual precariousness. They are far removed from formal constructive paintings. They are closer to gestural abstract art, given the apparent nonchalance with which the wood veneers are overlapped. To the eye, it is more like the visual disorder characteristic of the place that inspires it and from which the scraps of this material come, material that becomes pictorial in the artist's creative gesture.
The plasticity and sophistication of the movements in the large-scale curves and amoeboid forms seen in these works are a profusion of this shapeless, faded wood that in certain situations seems to swallow us. They are more like deconstructions of form, as if they were melting in Henrique Oliveira's pictorial gesture. They are the same waves of stormy seas seen in the paintings of the Englishman William Turner (1775-1851). Or the same abandon in the gesture of painting or intervening on the surface of the canvas seen in the work of the American Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), with his action paintings that record the gesture of throwing himself onto the canvas. But these works made of pieces of wood came later. Before that, the artist literally painted on canvas. Today, when he paints on this support, he uses large brushes or even brooms on canvases laid flat on the floor of his studio. They have the same gestural quality that would bring him even closer to the paintings of the Dutch-born, US-based Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) and of Pollock, but with a pop slant, in the artist's own words.
This would set it apart from the expressive informality seen in the works of these two artists and of other expressionists of the group formed in New York in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In Henrique Oliveira's paintings there is a formal control that strips his pictorial gestures of expression. In that early Ourinhos phase, wood was only in his surroundings. It was not yet part of his "way" of painting. That would come later, when he allowed himself to experiment with the language and to appropriate scraps of wood found on the city streets as pictorial material. Scraps like the leftovers used to clad the shacks typical of the favelas along highways or riverside expressways in large cities. They are the hoardings weathered by time on urban construction sites. It is the faded hues of these precarious structures, among grays, yellowish and reddish tones, that act as paint on the surface of these "paintings". Back in São Paulo after his time in Ourinhos, in mid-1998, Henrique Oliveira went to study at the Museu Brasileiro da Escultura, enrolling in the institution's art courses to take classes with the artists Paulo Whitaker and Nuno Ramos. That is where the "detours" would begin that led the "traditional" painter of the beginning of this text to become no longer a painter or sculptor, but simply an artist.
The first artist-teacher, Paulo Whitaker, is determined, with a solid background and a positive insistence on the language, with a painting that remains on the surface of the canvas. He paints with conviction. The second, Nuno Ramos, is artistic "chaos", in the good sense that word may carry. Nuno's work is the very deconstruction of the idea of painting. In the 1980s, his painting was material and dripped off the canvas. The volumes were made of grease, oil paint, burlap, pieces of wood, among other materials at hand. In the 1990s, his painting left the wall for good, incorporating all sorts of matter to give color and form to his large pictorial surfaces. Both Whitaker and Ramos, in a dichotomy, influenced him both for ill, in the sense of what conventional painting would be, and for good, in the sense of experimental painting, if we look at Henrique Oliveira's work in his most recent installations.
One could say that he learned to paint with Paulo Whitaker and "unlearned" with Nuno Ramos, in the good sense. Without ceasing to be painting, Oliveira's works question our notion of the language by taking it into three dimensions, whether hung on the wall or placed directly on the floor, as seen in the presentation of works in the Prêmio Marcantonio Vilaça exhibition of 2009 and 2010. Finally, he radicalized in his installations that engage with the architecture of the places where he exhibits. In the installations at the 2009 Mercosul Biennial and the 2010 Bienal de São Paulo, the three-dimensionality of the earlier works, still fixed to the plane of the wall, exploded once and for all. These are pieces or installations that could no longer be seen merely as sculptures or paintings. The most recent works are closer to installations in which the wood is no longer necessarily the kind found as scrap in cities. In some of the most recent works, the material undergoes treatments to make it more pliable and to heighten the colors, now controlled, so as to give them the desired tones. In others, the natural color of the wood ends up giving them the tone of human skin. Returning to his trajectory: after the MuBE courses, Henrique Oliveira went on to study at the Escola de Comunicações e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo. In 2003, at that school, he presented the first work of the Tapumes series. A large painting measuring 2 x 5 meters, worked on the flatness of what would be a canvas.
He completed his degree in visual arts in 2004, and that same year he presented in the Projéteis program of the Fundação Nacional de Artes, at the Palácio Gustavo Capanema, Rio de Janeiro, his first standout painting-installation in wood from the Tapumes series, which occupied an area of 4 x 12 meters. Another show worth remembering is the 1st Exhibition of the Exhibitions Program of the Centro Cultural São Paulo (2006). In that edition, the artist received the Acquisition Prize - Centro Cultural São Paulo for another installation from the Tapumes series, occupying an area of 3.5 x 12 x 1.5 meters. After attending the MuBE studios, the decision to take a second degree came from a long-held wish and also from his circumstances at the time - it meant he could continue taking classes with good artist-teachers and theorists. Graduate school was an option that arose in the wake of an undergraduate research grant. He defended his master's degree in 2007 at the Escola de Comunicações e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo, in visual poetics. Continuing this brief chronology, in 2009 the artist took part in the 7th Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre with a large-scale urban work, still from the Tapumes series - Casa dos Leões [House of the Lions], which occupied an old mansion in the city center. He treated the house as a body. Henrique Oliveira built a large installation in the center of Porto Alegre.
The large sculpture, or large installation, or even large painting, burst out of an old house, as if the house were regurgitating its living memory onto the city. It was almost a frightening sight. A situation seen from outside, from the street or the opposite sidewalk. Walking by, or looking out of car windows, people were surprised to catch sight of the installation. And finally, in 2010, he took part in his first Bienal de São Paulo with a work that we could call one of his most important installations. In this three-dimensional work, the viewer's position was reversed. It was seen from the inside out. Like a body opening up to the public. It recalls the installation made at Itaú Cultural, in São Paulo, in 2007, in the show Itaú Contemporâneo - Arte no Brasil 1981-2006, when the artist for the first time created an installation based on the idea of a house, or rather a cave, clearly inspired by the first great installation on record, the Merzbau (shown in Hanover in 1937). The masterpiece of the German artist Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), a decisive artist in the development of Henrique Oliveira's artistic process. The connection could lie in Schwitters's delicate collages made of cuttings and scraps of paper, newspapers and posters that recall the dirty walls and lampposts of cities and that would be aesthetically very close to Oliveira's wooden "collages". Roughly speaking, the Merzbau dealt with the idea of a large constructive, three-dimensional collage, a house made of pieces of wood. A collage-sculpture that recalled the inside of caves. Or even the cavernous bodies that make up the vagina. The installation A Origem do Terceiro Mundo [The Origin of the Third World], at the 2010 Bienal de São Paulo, in a way revisits the idea of the Merzbau, or even the Itaú Cultural installation.
It is as if we were thrown into the tunnel down which Alice fell into Wonderland. An endless cave. It is as if we were thrown into the abyss, into the bowels of a painting, with all its pigments on a large scale. They would be gigantic brushstrokes. It is as if a Pollock painting became three-dimensional; it is as if we were being thrown inside the human body. A female body, to be precise. Inside an enormous uterus. A situation achieved before, as in the canvas L'Origine du monde [The Origin of the World] (1866) by Gustave Courbet (1819-1877). It is as if we entered the body of that figure we see only in part. A "half" body of a woman whose middle shows the sex covered by a dense layer of black pubic hair. For its time it was a scandalous painting, and it has continued to unsettle some viewers since 1995, when it was first shown at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. Displayed before our eyes is a frontal view of a vagina. It is a small oil on canvas measuring 46 x 55 centimeters, depicting a close-up of the sex and belly of a woman lying naked on a bed, her thighs apart, exposing her vagina in its fullness, without any hint, however subtle, of sensuality. Oliveira's "painting", by contrast, is thickly layered and gigantic. It is a painting that pulses. A living body that seems to grow and expand. It takes on the ghostly features of a cave that makes us stoop to pass through it. But it also shelters us like a fetus within it, as if we were in a mother's womb. There is nothing erotic about it. It is as raw as Courbet's canvas, which does not arouse sexual desire in us - it reveals an anatomical aspect of the female genitalia. It is not the image of the beauty of a desirable woman revealing her intimate parts. Courbet's woman appears rather as a pictorial radicalization of the exposed female image. In Oliveira's work, what we see is a process of transforming the woman into an organic, life-giving object, the origin of life and of the world, although the title carries an irony that makes a political allusion to the condition of the existence of a "third world". In Oliveira's case, the female body is exposed more explicitly, revealing what lies inside - the internal parts of what would be the woman's sexual organ. Before reaching the Musée d'Orsay, Courbet's painting belonged to the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), its last owner before it was finally acquired by that French institution in 1994.
Even Lacan found it hard to leave it on view in his home, given its explicitness. The psychoanalyst commissioned from the surrealist André Masson another picture, a kind of landscape stylizing the female forms, to cover The Origin of the World. Lacan concealed Courbet's painting, revealing it only to a privileged few. Henrique Oliveira, on the contrary, with his A Origem do Terceiro Mundo, exposes it in its fullness at the 29th Bienal de São Paulo, obviously in another historical and social context. The idea of the origin of the Third World may have a political slant in referring to the Theory of Worlds coined by the Frenchman Alfred Sauvy. What would be a proposal for a revolution of the Earth became an expression to define the poor countries of Latin America, Africa and Asia, in a purely geopolitical division. But the issue in Oliveira's work may be different. More literal. Attractive and at the same time repulsive, the installation also refers to a cave, a constant theme in psychoanalytic studies when they refer to the female sexual organ. But what relationships did Lacan establish in his studies based on his interpretation of this work by Courbet? Why did Lacan keep this piece hidden from the eyes of the general public for so long? These are the questions I ask here and would put to a psychoanalyst. Why does the sight of the female sexual organ still cause so much unease, even when observed without any erotic slant in the eye of the beholder? And the relationship between Courbet and Henrique Oliveira is not limited to these two works. Courbet also painted many caves and stormy seas, in which one sees waves frozen as if in a photographic flash. They are landscapes and seascapes with a romantic slant, and caves that invite us to penetrate their dark, damp interiors. It is the immensity of the world in his paintings, with endless horizons that overwhelm us as insignificant beings on the surface of the Earth. Highly romantic visions, but also situations of great realism that heralded the themes of the impressionist and surrealist artists to come.
Courbet's work aroused the interest not only of Henrique Oliveira but also of great masters of impressionist painting such as Paul Cézanne and Édouard Manet. Masters of modern painting, such as Picasso, and of surrealism, such as Giorgio de Chirico, as well as Max Beckmann and Marcel Duchamp. Also like Courbet, who portrayed many caves, Henrique Oliveira has a special interest in them, particularly after visiting many of them in the Vale do Ribeira when he was still a teenager. Experiences that still fascinate him and resonate in his work. Coincidentally, while I was writing this text, I came across a Gustave Courbet retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt, Germany. His canvas The Origin of the World was not on display. It seems to remain excluded even from a major retrospective of such importance as this one in Frankfurt. Although mentioned in the wall text, the taboo surrounding this work still lives on, giving support to those who see a kind of "curse" embedded in it. A good work of art is a constant dialogue between the public and the artist's work, causing unease or not, as in The Origin of the World or A Origem do Terceiro Mundo, which turn those who look at them into mere voyeurs. A good painting or a good installation is therefore capable of an endless dialogue or an endless search for answers. Such is the case of this text which, like so many others, offers no answers, but rather more questions about Henrique Oliveira's work. I believe the artist is capable of producing this noise with his works of art. Noises that make us think without end. RESENDE, Ricardo: "tapumes", 2010. In: Prêmio CNI SESI Marcantônio Vilaça 2009/10. Authors: Alcino Leite Neto, Luiz Camillo Osório, Paulo Herkenhoff, Ricardo Resende. Brasília, SESI, pp. 68-71, 2011.
Juliana Monachesi - The Pulse of Contemporary Painting (2006)
I swear I'll give it back tomorrow but for now I think that I'll just borrow All the chords from that song And all the words from that other song I heard yesterday [The Strokes, "Electricityscape"] Henrique Oliveira's paintings have a musical parallel in the songs of the Strokes: both deviate from the rules of tradition without postmodern irony; rather, using the tools and parameters of tradition itself, they do not settle into the standard workings of their respective languages (painting and rock music), and this rupture shows above all in the abrupt transitions both make. A Strokes song begins and ends without preamble or closure. So do Oliveira's paintings. Other possible parallels with the Strokes: although a rock band, they manage to be a pop band at the same time, just as Henrique Oliveira's paintings are grounded in historical references of 20th-century art but contain influences from mass culture.
The Strokes appropriate the best of the rock tradition and make it sound current, just as Oliveira makes use of the most successful formal solutions from different moments of abstraction, updating them. "Thinking of the gestural painting made in the 20th century, it is as if procedures such as brushstrokes, drips and glazes could be decontextualized from history, separated, cataloged and then reconditioned in the search for another pictorial order. An order that, while recognizing itself as just one more possibility, manages to emancipate itself from the jargon that forms its own foundations", the artist explains in an analytical text about his work. Based on this thinking, Henrique Oliveira's painting would almost be a collage, since the overlapping layers have no communication or continuity between them. But unlike a Caetano de Almeida, who superimposes geometric abstraction on informal abstraction to create a postmodern pastiche, and also unlike a Beatriz Milhazes, who accumulates layers of signs without even touching a brush, producing a commentary on the baroque or the decorative, Oliveira's painting is made of brushstrokes, scrapings, poolings, drippings and runs. What kind of collage is this that the artist makes, so far removed from the collage procedures of Caetano de Almeida and Beatriz Milhazes? The Strokes' songs may offer a clue: they are collages, as the band itself confesses in the lyrics of "Electricityscape" - on the new album, "First Impressions of Earth" (2006) - of chords from this song and words from that other one, borrowed one day and returned the next. Oliveira borrows from here and there and gives everything back "reconditioned", but still betting on painting, on the "enjoyment of its materiality" and on the "constructive possibilities inherent to its medium", according to the artist. For him, painting can be considered an area where a certain media determinism in our perception of reality is suspended, a space - in short - where "a crack in the interpretation of the world" can occur, the painter ventures. MONACHESI, Juliana: "O Pulso da Pintura Atual". Bien'Art. Fundação Bienal de São Paulo. São Paulo, n. 18, p. 51, April 2006.
Public Collections
Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Austrália.
Museu de Arte Contemporânea do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre.
Museu de Arte Moderna - Rio de Janeiro.
Pinacoteca Municipal - Coleção de Arte da Cidade de São Paulo.
Coleção Centro Cultural da Universidade Federal de Goiás, Goiânia.
Coleção Itaú, São Paulo.
Coleção Metrópolis / TV Cultura, São Paulo.
Coleção Museu Afro-Brasil, São Paulo.
Education
Graduate studies 2007 Master's in Visual Poetics - Escola de Comunicações e Artes, Universidade de São Paulo.
Undergraduate 2004 Visual arts, bachelor's degree in painting - Escola de Comunicações e Artes - Universidade de São Paulo.
Solo Exhibitions
2012 Centro Municipal de Arte Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro.
2012 Realidade Líquida [Liquid Reality] - Galeria Millan, São Paulo.
2012 Ursulinens Prolapse - Offenes Kulturhaus, Linz, Austria.
2011 Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois, Paris, France.
2011 Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, USA.
2010 Colagens [Collages] - Alejandra von Hartz Gallery, Miami, USA.
2010 Galeria Silvia Cintra & Box 4, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
2009 Tapumes - Rice University Art Gallery - Houston, USA.
2009 Flying Circus Gallery - Monterrey, Mexico.
2008 Temporada de Projetos [Projects Season] - Paço das Artes - São Paulo.
2008 Galeria Baró Cruz - São Paulo.
2007 11th Cultura Inglesa Festival - British Council - São Paulo.
2007 Exhibitions Program - FUNARTE - São Paulo.
2006 1st Exhibitions Program Show - Centro Cultural São Paulo.
2006 Galeria Baró Cruz - São Paulo.
2005 Tapumes - Casa de Cultura da América Latina - Brasília.
2000 Drawings and Paintings - FUNARTE - São Paulo.
1998 Paintings - Universidade Estadual de Londrina.
Group Exhibitions
2012 OIR (Outras Ideias para o Rio [Other Ideas for Rio]) - Parque da Madureira, Rio de Janeiro.
2012 Inside Out and From the Ground Up - Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, USA.
2012 Sculpture is Everything - Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia.
2012 Travessias Project - Favela da Maré, Rio de Janeiro.
2011 Travessias Project, Galpão das Artes, Favela da Maré, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
2011 Art in Brazil (1950 - 2011), Festival Europalia - Palais des Beaux-Arts, Bozar, Brussels, Belgium.
2011 Artists in Dialogue 2: Sandile Zulu / Henrique Oliveira - Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington DC, USA.
2010 29th São Paulo International Biennial, Brazil.
2010 9th FEMSA Monterrey Biennial - Casa de la Cultura de Puebla, Mexico.
2010 3rd CNI SESI Marcantonio Vilaça Visual Arts Prize. Museu de Arte Moderna, Salvador, Brazil.
2010 9th FEMSA Monterrey Biennial - Centro Cultural Tijuana, Mexico.
2010 3rd CNI SESI Marcantonio Vilaça Visual Arts Prize. Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
2010 3rd CNI SESI Marcantonio Vilaça Visual Arts Prize. Museu de Arte Contemporânea, São Paulo, Brazil.
2010 3rd CNI SESI Marcantonio Vilaça Visual Arts Prize. Galeria Juvenal Antunes, Rio Branco, Brazil.
2010 3rd CNI SESI Marcantonio Vilaça Prize - Centro Cultural da Universidade Federal de Goiás, Goiânia, Brazil.
2010 1 de Cada 1 [1 of Each 1] - Galeria Silvia Cintra & Box 4, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
2009 9th FEMSA Monterrey Biennial - Centro de las Artes, Monterrey, Mexico.
2009 7th Mercosul Biennial - Porto Alegre, Brazil.
2009 Nova Arte Nova [New New Art] - Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, São Paulo.
2009 Gabinete [Cabinet] - Museu Vítor Meireles - Florianópolis, Brazil.
2008 Nova Arte Nova [New New Art] - Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro.
2008 Seja Marginal, Seja Herói [Be an Outlaw, Be a Hero] - Galerie Vallois and Galerie Seroussi, Paris, France.
2008 Something from Nothing - Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, USA.
2008 Summer Exhibition - Galeria Silvia Cintra/ Box4 - Rio de Janeiro.
2008 Art for the Amazon - Fundação Bienal de São Paulo - São Paulo.
2008 Studio Project - Galeria Baró Cruz - São Paulo.
2007 Futuro do Presente [Future of the Present] - Instituto Itaú Cultural - São Paulo.
2007 CTRL _ C + CTRL_V/ Recortar e Colar [Cut and Paste] - Sesc Pompeia - São Paulo.
2007 La Espiral de Moebius o los limites de la pintura - Centro Cultural Parque de España - Rosário, Argentina.
2007 Ut pictura diversitas, Galeria Marta Traba, Memorial da América Latina - São Paulo.
2007 Itaú Contemporâneo - Arte no Brasil 1981-2006, Instituto Itaú Cultural - São Paulo.
2007 Arte BA / Open Space - Buenos Aires, Argentina.
2006 13th Salão da Bahia - Salvador.
2006 Fiat Mostra Brasil - Porão das Artes, Pavilhão da Bienal - São Paulo.
2006 Paralela 2006 - Parque do Ibirapuera - São Paulo.
2006 Exhibitions program group show - Centro Cultural São Paulo.
2006 Viva Cultura Viva do Povo Brasileiro - Um Olhar sobre a Arte Brasileira [Long Live the Living Culture of the Brazilian People - A Look at Brazilian Art] - Museu Afro Brasil, Parque do Ibirapuera - São Paulo.
2006 FUNARTE Projéteis Contemporary Art Prize - Palácio da Cultura Gustavo Capanema - Rio de Janeiro.
2005 Projectiles d'Art Contemporain at Espace Brésil / FUNARTE / Year of Brazil in France - Paris.
2005 5th Flamboyant Prize National Art Salon of Goiás - Goiânia.
2005 Visualidade Nascente [Emerging Visuality] - Centro Universitário Maria Antonia- São Paulo.
2005 Em Trânsito [In Transit] - artists graduated from ECA/USP - Galeria Olido - São Paulo.
2004 FUNARTE Projéteis of Contemporary Art - Palácio da Cultura Gustavo Capanema - Rio de Janeiro.
2004 9th Santos Visual Arts Biennial.
2004 Exhibitions Program - Museu de Arte de Ribeirão Preto.
2003 Art of the New Millennium - Centro Cultural Guimarães Rosa - Jundiaí-SP.
2003 Interiores [Interiors] - 4 ECA/USP students - FUNARTE - São Paulo.
2002 5th Revelation Prize Show - Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Americana.
2002 Espaço Miolo group show - São Paulo.
2002 Miolo - FUNARTE - São Paulo.
1999 31st Piracicaba Contemporary Art Salon.
Awards
2011 APCA Award (Associação Paulista de Críticos de Arte [São Paulo Art Critics Association]) - Highlight of the Year, São Paulo.
2009 CNI SESI Marcantonio Vilaça Visual Arts Prize.
2007 Cultura Inglesa Festival Prize - British Council, São Paulo.
2007 Water Tower Trophy, visual arts category - Cultura Inglesa Festival - São Paulo.
2006 Acquisition prize - Centro Cultural São Paulo.
2006 FUNARTE Projéteis Contemporary Art Prize - Rio de Janeiro.
2006 Fiat Mostra Brasil Prize.
2005 Visualidade Nascente Prize - Centro Universitário Maria Antonia.
Grants and Residencies
2013 SAM Art Projects - Paris, France.
2010 The Fountainhead Residency - Miami, USA.
2009 Artist Research Fellowship - Smithsonian Institution - Washington DC, USA.
2008 Cité Internationale des Arts - studio residency - Paris, France.
2005 FAPESP - master's grant - project Pintura e Linguagem Pictórica - Técnicas e Materiais na Arte Contemporânea Brasileira [Painting and Pictorial Language - Techniques and Materials in Brazilian Contemporary Art].
2005 Atelier Amarelo - studio residency - São Paulo.
2004 FAPESP - undergraduate research grant - project Matéria e Imagem - Uma Pesquisa Pictórica sob o Ponto de Vista Material [Matter and Image - A Pictorial Investigation from the Material Point of View].
Source: henriqueoliveira.com
