Geraldo de Barros | Alban Galeria

Important photographer, painter, graphic artist and furniture designer, Geraldo de Barros masters’ in painting and drawing were Clóvis Graciano, Collete Pujol and Yoshiya Takaoka. Together with Takaoka, Athayde de Barros and Antônio Carelli, he created, in 1947, the Grupo XV. In the same year he joined the Foto Cine Clube Bandeirantes, where he developed his photographic experiences that had been initiated in 1946.
In 1948 he met the art critic and essayist Mario Pedrosa, who played an important role in his artistic and intellectual education. Through Pedrosa, Geraldo got in touch for the first time with the Gestalt Theory and Paul Klee’s work.
In 1949, invited by Pietro Maria Bardi, he organized together with Thomaz Farkas the photographic laboratory of the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP). There he began to develop his own photographic projects and to prepare his exhibition called Fotoformas, that was inaugurated in January 1951 at the same museum. From this exhibition, the pioneer of abstract photography in Brazil, Geraldo is granted with a fellowship from French government to study in Paris.
During the period he lived in Paris, he studied engraving at the National Superior School of Fine Arts under the teaching of S.W. Hayter. He also met Cartier-Bresson, Giorgio Morandi, Brassaï, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, François Morellet and Otl Aicher, with whom he began to learn graphic design in Ulm. In Zurich he met Max Bill, whose work Geraldo saw for the first time in 1950, during the assembling of his retrospective exhibition at the MASP, in São Paulo.
Together with the group called Ruptura (that he, Waldemar Cordeiro, Luiz Sacilotto and others founded in 1952) he took part in the First National Exhibition of Concrete Art, held at São Paulo (1956) and Rio de Janeiro (1957), and also in the international exhibition called Konkrete Kunst: 50 Jahre Entwicklung, produced by Max Bill in Zurich in 1960.
In 1954, de Barros created, together with the Dominican Friar João Batista, the workers’ community Unilabor, for which he designed modular furniture. With Alexandre Wollner and Rubens Martins, he founded the group called Forminform (1957), a graphic arts office. Geraldo participated of Unilabor until 1964, when he left and conceived HOBJETO Furniture Industry.
In 1966, Geraldo de Barros, Wesley Duke Lee and Nelson Leiner founded “Grupo Rex Time” – the Art Gallery where the first happenings in São Paulo took place.
From the late 1970s, Geraldo took up the basic principles of Concret Art and began to work with the concept of serialization, constructing his artworks with plastic laminate (formica). The result of this work was displayed in the 42nd Venice Biennale, in 1986, and in Tschudi Gallery, in Glarus, Switzerland, in 1987.
Geraldo exhibited the complete series Jogos de dados [Dice Games], with 55 works made of plastic laminate, in 1989 at the Museum of Contemporary art of Campinas and, in 1991, at the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art (MAM-SP).
In 1993, the entire photographic work of Geraldo de Barros is rescued by the Musée de l’Elysée, in Lausanne, at the exhibition entitled Geraldo de Barros, Pintor e fotógrafo [Geraldo de Barros, painter and photographer]. This same exhibition is presented at the São Paulo Museum of Image and Sound.
In 1996, Geraldo began a new series of photographs called Sobras [Leftovers], in which he used family negatives that he cut out, painted and assembled into sheets of glass. The filmmaker Michel Favre recorded the development of this work from the beginning to the making of the film called “Sobras em Obras”.
The originality of Geraldo de Barros' career is now recognized worldwide, and his works are part of public and private collections, including, among others, The Museum of Contemporary Art of São Paulo; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; Musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne; SESC of São Paulo; The Inhotim Institute of Contemporary Art; MoMA, New York; Centre George Pompidou, Paris and TATE Modern, London. Since 2015, all his photographic negatives have been deposited at the Moreira Salles Institute, in Rio de Janeiro