Willys de Castro

Willys de Castro (Uberlândia, 1926 - São Paulo, 1988)

Objeto Ativo [Active Object], three-dimensional work; oil on canvas on wood, 138x2x11, 1960.

Willys de Castro was a Brazilian painter, printmaker, draftsman, set designer, costume designer, graphic artist and visual artist linked to the Concrete and Neoconcrete movements, who worked with painting, printmaking, drawing, set design, costumes and graphic work, bringing to the diversity of his output the relationships between form, color, space and time. Through them he embraced the reinterpretation of the visual language of Mondrian and Malevich - Suprematism, geometric abstraction, monochrome and spatial movements[1] - of the Russian avant-garde and of the Dutch "Stijl" artists, later developed further in certain directions by Max Bill - the leading exponent of the Swiss School - and the Ulm group[2].

1941: In São Paulo he studied drawing with André Fort. Between 1944 and 1949 he worked as a technical draftsman and graduated in Chemistry.

1950: He began an internship in graphic arts and made his first abstract-geometric paintings and drawings, that is, geometric research of mathematical rigor combined with the simplification of form[3], which led him to produce works of a constructivist nature (ca. 1953) that bring him close to the three-dimensional reliefs of Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953), whose artistic expression would later be persecuted by the socialist realism imposed by Josef Stalin. Other important links: (1) Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) in 1911, in Germany; (2) De Stijl, created in 1917, which brought together Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) and Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931) around abstract research; and (3) Suprematism, founded in 1915 by Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935), also in Russia.

It is clear that understanding Willys's artistic production requires an understanding of the movements related to Suprematism, Neoplasticism - abstract geometric painting made up of horizontal and vertical black lines on a white background combined with blocks of the primary colors 'red, blue and yellow', typical of Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) -, Constructivism and Concretism, led in São Paulo in the 1950s by Waldemar Cordeiro[4], which implied an abstract form of art with no representation or symbolic content other than the work itself, we might say:

"The developmentalist context of belief in industry and progress sets the tone of the period in which the followers of concrete art in Brazil would be active. The concrete program starts from a rapprochement between artistic and industrial work. Any lyrical or symbolic connotation is removed from art. The picture, built exclusively with plastic elements - planes and colors -, has no meaning other than itself".

In Brazil, the movement gave rise to Rio de Janeiro's "neoconcretism" from 1959; read:

"Against constructive orthodoxies and geometric dogmatism, the neoconcrete artists defend freedom of experimentation, the return to expressive intentions and the recovery of subjectivity[5]".

1960's: Historically, his work is best known for the "objetos ativos" [active objects], made in this period, which combine the color of painting with the relief of sculpture. In general, they are works painted on canvas and glued onto wood, showing geometric painting on three of their four edges, with the fourth edge fixed to the wall, so that the viewer cannot take in the full extent of the work in a single glance[6].

1954: ...he founded a graphic design studio with Hércules Barsotti (1914-2010) and took part in the Ars Nova movement, creating concrete-visual poems presented at the Teatro Brasileiro de Comédia - TBC. He was a co-founder of the magazine Teatro Brasileiro in 1955. He made sets, costumes and productions for the Teatro de Arena and the Teatro Cultura Artística. In 1957, he received an award from the Associação Paulista de Críticos Teatrais and worked as technical adviser to the magazine Vértice.

In 1958, he went to Europe to study and, on his return the following year, joined the Neoconcrete Group of Rio de Janeiro, alongside Hércules Barsotti, Ferreira Gullar (1930-2016), Franz Weissmann (1911-2005) and Lygia Clark (1920-1988), among others.

1960: Between 1959 and 1962, he produced the series Objetos Ativos, works that explore plane and volume as plastic elements, questioning the use of the canvas as the support of pictorial language.

He was a co-founder and member of the Associação Brasileira de Desenho Industrial - ABDI and of the Grupo Novas Tendências. From 1966 to 1967, he designed fabric patterns for industrial production.

In the 1980s, he began researching constructions in wood, metal, stainless steel and other materials, with effects of color and movement: the Pluri-objetos.

In the "Willys de Castro Exhibition", curated by the historian Regina Teixeira de Barros[7] and shown in 2012 at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, the main thematic groups can be seen, namely: "Anjos" [Angels] (1955), "Soma entre planos" [Sum between planes] and "Objetos ativos[8]" (1959 - 1962), "Pluriobjetos" (1988) and graphic projects.

Despite Waldemar Cordeiro's harsh and inflexible leadership, the concrete artists followed different paths among themselves: Fiaminghi, Sacilotto, Nogueira Lima, Cordeiro, Lothar Charoux and Willys himself, not to mention the Rio artists Amílcar de Castro, Weissmann, Palatnik, Carvão, Lygia Pape and Oiticica, among others.

Florilegium

Willys de Castro made his first paintings in the late 1940s and, from 1950, worked with geometric abstraction. In 1954, he founded the Estúdio de Projetos Gráficos with the artist Hércules Barsotti (1914-2010), where he worked until 1964. He devoted himself to visual programming and to fabric pattern designs. In the 1950s and 1960s he also made sets and costumes for the theater. The artist's production in the second half of the 1950s relates to that of the artists of the concrete movement. He called his works simply Pinturas [Paintings], numbering them or indicating that they were a second or third version. He worked with a deliberately restricted number of issues: balance, tension and instability.

The work Desintegração 5 [Disintegration 5] (n.d.) presents a structure formed by colored triangles distributed along a central-diagonal axis, which tends to rotate on itself. These triangles are joined to one another by a single vertex. The composition suggests a balance about to break and is stabilized by the triangles formed in the voids between the colored triangles. Symmetry and asymmetry, real and invisible elements thus coexist in this work. In Pintura 172 (n.d.), the artist presents the metaphor of the eclipse, exploring the passage of one circular form over another. In another painting, Pintura (1958), Willys deals with the relationship between contiguity and distance: as in a game of billiards, the spheres touch and propel one another. In these works, he works with elements and issues common to the concrete movement: pure colors, geometric forms, optical and kinetic effects and closeness to graphic design. The basic structure of the picture is not broken, as happens in later works.

From 1959, he created the Objetos Ativos, his best-known works, consisting of rectangular pieces of wood - wooden profiles or rulers - covered with canvas, with three surfaces painted in an abstract-geometric manner. These objects are fixed to the wall by one side. The painting on the front plane thus continues on the side planes. Viewers must move, and their gaze must travel across the surfaces to see the object as a whole. The work seems to float in space and is created at the moment of its perception. The artist deals with issues related to the conflict between two-dimensional surface and real space. His aim is to question the use of the canvas as the support of pictorial language, and in this way he comes close to the same line as the neoconcrete works of Lygia Clark (1920 - 1988) and Hélio Oiticica (1937 - 1980).

After almost two decades without exhibiting, in the mid-1970s and building on research begun with the Objetos Ativos, Willys made the Pluriobjetos, metal or wooden sculptures resulting from operations similar to those of the Objetos Ativos: the displacement of a portion or element that reorders the whole. He thus engages in dialogue with other three-dimensional experiments by artists such as Amilcar de Castro (1920 - 2002) and Franz Weissmann (1911 - 2005). In Pluriobjeto A6 (1988), for example, he works with a vertical wooden structure in which he explores, through a displacement, the tension between stability and instability, while giving it great lightness. In the Pluriobjetos, as in the Objetos Ativos, the work is never complete, because there is no ideal viewpoint and the viewer must question it from various angles.

Willys de Castro explores very subtle relationships between form, color, space and time. He is one of the most notable participants in the neoconcrete movement and stands out for research that made him one of the pioneers in breaking with the use of the two-dimensional surface of the canvas as the support for pictorial language. For the art critic Frederico Morais, the Objetos Ativos are his greatest contribution to Brazilian constructive art.

Critiques

"Regardless of his reduced output in recent years - more focused as he is on visual programming and fabric pattern designs -, Willys de Castro created in the early 1960s, as a participant in the neoconcrete movement, a series of works he himself called objetos ativos [active objects], whose importance has continued to gain new aspects today. As in Barsotti's drawings and paintings - but already with full chromatic, playful and lyrical liveliness, and clearly on the way to overcoming the plane through space -, these objects once again raised the old question of the best meeting point between the virtual and the real. They were pieces of wood the thickness of planks, geometrically treated with paint on three of their four surfaces; by the fourth surface they were fixed to the wall, so that the viewer could follow a 180-degree path of vision, never managing, however, to grasp the whole perception of any of these pieces at a single moment. Ferreira Gullar, referring to them, discerned in them an attempt to eliminate the ´basic surface of painting, reducing the front plane of the work to the edge of the surface, to its thickness. The color that occupies this narrow plane from top to bottom suddenly breaks at a certain point, and the fragment of color missing there slides onto the side plane, indicating a continuity of the surface outside the plane. The problem posed by these works is interesting and new, because it restates in other terms the conflict between the two-dimensional surface and the space of real depth: time - the movement of the viewer - recovers the two-dimensionality of three-dimensional space´. Today, in the few new objects he produces, Willys de Castro has in fact sought to refine that earlier research, including, occasionally, in the field of the multiple, to extract from it all the richness of its implicit possibilities".
Roberto Pontual
PONTUAL, Roberto. Arte/ Brasil/ hoje: 50 anos depois. São Paulo: Collectio, 1973. p.393.

"(...) Rather than producing syntheses and adding things to the world, Willys de Castro seems determined to dissect the miracles of reason, to descend into the various and complex dimensions, the various and complex articulations that produce a thing, any thing at all. That is why, since the active objects of 1959, his strategy has always been less to create objects than to bring out the problematic character of the object, to show its situation, so to speak, to point to its nature. Ultimately, to investigate the conditions of its appearance. And if the problem of appearance certainly goes back to the purest tradition of Greek metaphysics, here it receives a decidedly modern answer - it is a matter of interpreting perception as a certain mode of logical making. Of course, art does not, and must not, simply repeat the formulations of science. One need only recall the artist's dissent from concretist mechanism. The aesthetic dimension does much more: it places the individual back in today's troubled and strange world by leading him to have the sensory experience of the Real as modern science understands and constructs it. Like Josef Albers, for example, Willys de Castro sees art as an effort to structure the real parallel to that of science and inseparable from it. If someone were to argue that there would thus be something of science in this art, we might be obliged to agree. Only to add at once that, ultimately, there would also be something of art in science".
Ronaldo Brito
MODERNIDADE: arte brasileira do século XX. Paris: Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1988.

"Willys de Castro and Hércules Barsotti are two São Paulo artists who, dissenting from Waldemar Cordeiro's leadership, drew close to the Rio group and took part in the neoconcrete exhibitions. As painters, both used an economical vocabulary derived from concretist experiments. Willys de Castro, however, questioned the use of the canvas as the support of pictorial language, and that is what led him to create the 'active objects' (...). Willys de Castro's 'active objects' derive from the same inventive line as other neoconcrete works, especially Oiticica's 'reliefs' and some of Lygia's 'modulated surfaces'. They are related but different, that is, a different answer to the same question that generated all these answers: the picture (or canvas) as the object of painting. Just as the abandonment of finish (fini) in Impressionist painting pointed to the autonomy of pictorial language and, along that course, to abstract painting, the elimination of the subject-object led to the rupture with the two-dimensional surface of the canvas. Willys, so to speak, positions it perpendicular to the wall, shows us its edge, its thickness, and paints on it: he makes a micro-composition which, by extending onto the side face of the 'canvas', underlines its three-dimensionality".
Ferreira Gullar
AMARAL, Aracy (coord.). Arte construtiva no Brasil: Coleção Adolpho Leirner. São Paulo: DBA, 1998. p.178 a 181.

"At first sight, Willys de Castro's first concrete works are similar to those of the members of Ruptura. They rely on the 'grid' underpinning the arrangement of plastic elements with mathematical formulas and seek an anonymous image. Immediately, however, the use of color sets his works apart from the group's production. One of the few colorist talents of Brazilian concretism, understanding form and color as inseparable - form-color -, the artist was indifferent to the chromatic dogma of Waldemar Cordeiro and his companions: the prescription of primary and complementary colors, the prohibition of tonalism and the dichotomy between form and color with the subordination of the latter to the former - simple but restrictive rules, proposing color as a concept. (...) Willys de Castro's experiments in concretism, aiming to renew the pictorial plane and Euclidean geometry as, respectively, an autonomous plastic structure and an emancipated visual language, developed along three lines of investigation: the examination of the spatiality characteristic of the easel canvas, the study of the semantic possibilities of the geometric visual lexicon, and the integration of plastic and informational research into a single vein of experimentation. The conquest of a support averse to illusionistic maneuvers and of a formal language free from the obligation to depict the things of the world were fundamental stages in the process of Painting's self-awareness and in the painter's acquisition of self-presenting and autonomous plastic-informational means".
Roberto Conduru
CONDURU, Roberto. Willys de Castro: o belo na ordem do dia. 1998. 104 p., il. p&b. Mestrado - , Rio de Janeiro, 1998, p. 16-18.

"Willys de Castro's effort was always directed toward creating a self-referential work, drawing the viewer's attention to what happens within the restricted space of the work. As the artist wrote: 'Containing events of its own time - begun, elapsed, ended and begun again - and demonstrated there clearly, fluently and indefinitely, the Active Object inaugurates itself in the world as an instrument for telling itself'. In it there is no longer any opposition between front and back, right side and reverse, inside and outside, center and periphery, between the real and the virtual and, ultimately, between the viewer and the work. The work seems to float in a space that has no name yet, since it is being created at the moment of perception. In the Active Object, as in his Pluriobjetos of the 1980s, space is not single-focus and perspectival, but open, enveloping, phenomenological. The viewer's gaze, activated, must be attentive to everything that happens on the canvas, relief or object, connecting what remains with what is missing, filling void with solid, completing what is incomplete, coming and going in elliptical paths. Time as raw material. Not machine time, pendular and repetitive, but organic time, the time of the body, which is always unpredictable".
Frederico Morais
TRIDIMENSIONALIDADE: arte brasileira do século XX. 2. ed. São Paulo: Itaú Cultural : Cosac & Naify, 1999. p. 232.

"While the exhaustion of the real and virtual potential of the plane led Clark and Oiticica to abandon painting for good, Hércules Barsotti never stopped painting, while Willys de Castro lingered for a long time in a borderline zone between picture and object. Well acquainted with the issues inherent in painting, he set about exploring every side of the problem in detail, as a double agent would. Aware that a visual event, even one restricted to the plane, is never exhausted in a single reading, he uses minimal interventions to lead the eye across the surface from one edge to the other, noticing gaps and slippages, so as to reassemble the composition gestaltically. Through small openings and wide leaks, he suggests the continuation of the painting beyond the rectangle of the picture. The overflow of paint onto the side of the support and from there onto its back, a 180-degree turn, forces and recovers thickness, an essential datum of volume: in the strip perpendicular to the wall, what was the side of the picture becomes the front, and the back disappears. The emphasis on the frontality of what was originally a profile ends up reducing the object to a batten on which small cuts and displacements intervene. Painting finally vacates the narrow space and, against the wall, bundles of wood or strips of metal remain. Step by step, through discreet and consistent actions, Willys de Castro formed his plastic thinking, which makes his work methodologically comparable to a work of investigation".
Maria Alice Milliet
MOSTRA DO REDESCOBRIMENTO, 2000, SÃO PAULO, SP. Arte moderna. São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo: Associação Brasil 500 anos Artes Visuais, 2000. p.54.

Collections

Coleção Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo - SP
Coleção Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo - SP
Gabinete de Arte Raquel Arnaud - São Paulo SP

Solo Exhibitions

1959 - São Paulo SP - Solo, at Galeria de Arte das Folhas
1962 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Solo, at Petite Galerie
1962 - São Paulo SP - Solo, at Petite Galerie
1983 - São Paulo SP - Solo, at Gabinete de Arte Raquel Arnaud

Group Exhibitions

1953 - São Paulo SP - August Salon, at Casa do Povo
1954 - São Paulo SP - 3rd São Paulo Salon of Modern Art, at Galeria Prestes Maia
1957 - São Paulo SP - 4th Bienal Internacional de São Paulo, at Pavilhão Ciccillo Matarazzo Sobrinho
1957 - São Paulo SP - 6th São Paulo Salon of Modern Art, at Galeria Prestes Maia - Prêmio Governador do Estado
1958 - São Paulo SP - 7th São Paulo Salon of Modern Art, at Galeria Prestes Maia
1959 - Assunção (Paraguay) - Obras del Museo de Arte Moderno de San Pablo, at Salon Carlos Antonio Lopes
1959 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 1st Neoconcrete Art Exhibition, at MAM/RJ
1959 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Book-Poem, at Jornal do Brasil
1959 - Salvador BA - 1st Neoconcrete Art Exhibition, at Galeria Belvedere da Sé
1960 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 2nd Neoconcrete Art Exhibition, at Ministério da Educação e Cultura
1960 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 9th National Salon of Modern Art, at MAM/RJ
1960 - Zurich (Switzerland) - Konkrete Kunst, at Helmhaus
1961 - Paris (France) - 2nd Biennale des Jeunes, at Musée d´Art Moderne de La Ville de Paris
1961 - São Paulo SP - 3rd Neoconcrete Art Exhibition, at MAM/SP
1961 - São Paulo SP - 6th Bienal Internacional de São Paulo, at Pavilhão Ciccillo Matarazzo Sobrinho
1963 - Kobe (Japan) - International Society of Plastic Art, at Daimaru's Exhibition Hall
1964 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 2nd The Face and the Work, at Galeria Ibeu Copacabana
1965 - London (England) - Brazilian Art Today, at Royal Academy of Arts
1966 - Bonn (Germany) - Brasilianische Kunst Heute, at Beethovenhalle
1967 - São Paulo SP - Print Exhibition, at Galeria Arte
1969 - São Paulo SP - Original Prints, at Galeria Astréia
1970 - São Paulo SP - Inaugural Exhibition, at Galeria Astréia
1971 - São Paulo SP - Retrospective of Brazilian Fashion, at Masp
1972 - São Paulo SP - Art/Brazil/Today: 50 Years Later, at Galeria da Collectio
1973 - Brussels (Belgium) - Image of Brazil, at Manhattan Center
1975 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Communication According to Visual Artists, at Rede Globo - traveling
1977 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Brazilian Constructive Project in Art: 1950-1962, at MAM/RJ
1977 - São Paulo SP - Brazilian Constructive Project in Art: 1950-1962, at Pinacoteca do Estado
1982 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Contemporaneity: Tribute to Mário Pedrosa, at MAM/RJ
1983 - São Paulo SP - Imagining the Present, at Gabinete de Arte Raquel Arnaud
1984 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Neoconcretism 1959-1961, at Galeria de Arte Banerj
1984 - São Paulo SP - Tradition and Rupture: A Synthesis of Brazilian Art and Culture, at Fundação Bienal
1985 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Encounters, at Petite Galerie
1985 - São Paulo SP - Highlights of Brazilian Contemporary Art, at MAM/SP
1987 - Paris (France) - Modernidade: Brazilian Art of the 20th Century, at Musée d'Art Moderne de La Ville de Paris
1987 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 1st Geometric Abstraction: Concretism and Neoconcretism, at Fundação Nacional de Arte. Centro de Artes
1987 - São Paulo SP - 19th Bienal Internacional de São Paulo - In Search of Essence - Elements of Reduction in Brazilian Art, at Fundação Bienal
1987 - São Paulo SP - 1st Geometric Abstraction: Concretism and Neoconcretism, at MAB/Faap

Posthumous Exhibitions

1988 - São Paulo SP - Adventures of Order, at Gabinete de Arte Raquel Arnaud
1988 - São Paulo SP - MAC 25 Years: Recent Acquisitions and Donations, at MAC/USP
1988 - São Paulo SP - Modernidade: Brazilian Art of the 20th Century, at MAM/SP
1989 - São Paulo SP - 10 Sculptors, at Gabinete de Arte Raquel Arnaud
1990 - São Paulo SP - Coherence - Transformation, at Gabinete de Arte Raquel Arnaud
1991 - São Paulo SP - Constructivism: Poster Art 40/50/60, at MAC/USP
1992 - Curitiba PR - 10th Curitiba City Printmaking Show/Mostra América, at Museu da Gravura
1992 - Zurich (Switzerland) - Brasilien: Entdeckung und Selbstentdeckung, at Kunsthaus Zürich
1993 - São Paulo SP - Masp at Morumbi Shopping, at Shopping Morumbi
1994 - São Paulo SP - Bienal Brasil Século XX, at Fundação Bienal
1994 - São Paulo SP - Solo, at Masp
1994 - São Paulo SP - Willys de Castro: Works from 1954-1961, at Escritório de Arte Sylvio Nery da Fonseca
1996 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Constructive Tendencies in the MAC/USP Collection: Construction, Measure and Proportion, at CCBB
1996 - São Paulo SP - Brazilian Art: 50 Years of History in the MAC/USP Collection: 1920-1970, at MAC/USP
1996 - São Paulo SP - The World of Mário Schenberg, at Casa das Rosas
1997 - Porto Alegre RS - 1st Bienal de Artes Visuais do Mercosul, at Fundação Bienal de Artes Visuais do Mercosul
1997 - Porto Alegre RS - Constructive Strand and Design, at Espaço Cultural ULBRA
1997 - São Paulo SP - Three-Dimensionality in 20th-Century Brazilian Art, at Itaú Cultural
1998 - Belo Horizonte MG - Three-Dimensionality in 20th-Century Brazilian Art, at Itaú Cultural
1998 - Brasília DF - Three-Dimensionality in 20th-Century Brazilian Art, at Itaú Galeria
1998 - Penápolis SP - Three-Dimensionality in 20th-Century Brazilian Art, at Galeria Itaú Cultural
1998 - São Paulo SP - 24th Bienal Internacional de São Paulo, at Fundação Bienal
1998 - São Paulo SP - Constructive Art in Brazil: Adolpho Leirner Collection, at MAM/SP
1999 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Constructive Art in Brazil: Adolpho Leirner Collection, at MAM/RJ
1999 - São Paulo SP - Everyday Life/Art. Consumption - Metamorphosis of Consumption, at Itaú Cultural
2000 - Lisbon (Portugal) - 20th Century: Art of Brazil, at Centro de Arte Moderna José de Azeredo Perdigão
2000 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Mira Schendel, Sérgio de Camargo and Willys de Castro, at CCBB
2000 - São Paulo SP - Brasil + 500 Mostra do Redescobrimento. Contemporary Art, at Fundação Bienal
2000 - São Paulo SP - Brazilian Sculpture: From the Pinacoteca to the Jardim da Luz, at Pinacoteca do Estado
2000 - São Paulo SP - The Angels Are Back, at Pinacoteca do Estado
2001 - São Paulo SP - Solo, at Pinacoteca do Estado
2001 - São Paulo SP - The Trajectory of Light in Brazilian Art, at Itaú Cultural
2002 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Archipelagos: The Plural Universe of MAM, at MAM/RJ
2002 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Brazilian Art in the Fadel Collection: From the Restlessness of the Modern to the Autonomy of Language, at CCBB
2002 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Paths of the Contemporary 1952-2002, at Paço Imperial
2002 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Genealogy of Space, at Galeria do Parque das Ruínas
2002 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Parallels: Brazilian Art of the Second Half of the 20th Century in Context, Colección Cisneros, at MAM/RJ
2002 - São Paulo SP - Brazilian Art in the Fadel Collection: From the Restlessness of the Modern to the Autonomy of Language, at CCBB
2002 - São Paulo SP - The Plane as Structure of Form, at Espaço MAM - Villa-Lobos
2002 - São Paulo SP - Parallels: Brazilian Art of the Second Half of the 20th Century in Context, Colección Cisneros, at MAM/SP
2003 - Belo Horizonte MG - Geometric, at Léo-Bahia Arte Contemporânea
2003 - Brasília DF - Brazilian Art in the Fadel Collection: From the Restlessness of the Modern to the Autonomy of Language, at CCBB
2003 - Campos dos Goytacazes RJ - Planar-Spatial Poem, at Sesc
2003 - Mexico City (Mexico) - Cuasi Corpus: arte concreto y neoconcreto de Brasil: una selección del acervo del Museo de Arte Moderna de São Paulo y la Colección Adolpho Leirner, at Museo Rufino Tamayo
2003 - Nova Friburgo RJ - Planar-Spatial Poem, at Galeria Sesc Nova Friburgo
2003 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Project in Black and White, at Silvia Cintra Galeria de Arte
2003 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Order x Freedom, at MAM/RJ
2003 - São Paulo SP - Printmaking Is Doing Fine, Thank You, at Espaço Virgílio
2003 - São Paulo SP - Sculptors, Sculptures, at Pinakotheke
2003 - São Paulo SP - Tomie Ohtake in the Spiritual Fabric of Brazilian Art, at Instituto Tomie Ohtake
2003 - São Paulo SP - A Difficult Moment of Balance, at Espaço MAM - Villa-Lobos
2004 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - 90 Years of Tomie Ohtake, at MNBA
2004 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Tomie Ohtake in the Spiritual Fabric of Brazilian Art, at MNBA
2005 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Soto: The Construction of Immateriality, at CCBB