Geraldo de Barros

Biography

In 1996 Geraldo de Barros, almost immobilised after several cerebral ischaemic attacks, returned to photography, which he had abandoned decades earlier. Together with his assistant, the photographer Ana Moraes, he made his last series of 250 works, “Sobras” (“Leftovers”).

He was born on 27 February 1923 in Chavantes, in the state of São Paulo. At sixteen he built a camera himself and began scratching and reworking negatives. From 1945 to 1947 he studied drawing and painting with Clóvis Graciano, Collete Pujol and Yoshioka Takaoka, painting figures and landscapes. Then he came to abstraction: he studied European Constructivism of the 1920s and 1930s, and Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg influenced him. In 1946 he began studying painting at the Associação Paulista de Belas Artes. He earned his living at Banco do Brasil at the time and remained an employee for many years. In 1948 he became one of the founders of Grupo XV, a collective of painters, mostly of Japanese descent. In the same year the critic Mário Pedrosa introduced him to Gestalt theory, and form became his chief subject. He looked to Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, the Bauhaus, and the experiments of László Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray. In 1949, together with Athaíde de Barros and Thomaz Farkas, he opened a photography lab, joined the Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante in São Paulo, and organised the photography laboratory of the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP).

In 1950 that museum held the exhibition “Fotoformas”. The series, dated 1946–1952, is built on multiple exposures, rotated images and abstracted forms; the pictures convey the urban experience of a rapidly growing São Paulo. The title was suggested by Gestalt theory.

In 1951, on a scholarship from the French government, he took a year’s leave from the bank and went to Paris, where he studied lithography at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts and engraving in Stanley William Hayter’s studio. He then studied at the Ulm School of Design under Otl Aicher, where he met Max Bill. To my mind, this turn determined everything that followed: he gave up photography for concrete art, and for more than thirty years. In 1952, with Judith Lauand, Luiz Sacilotto, Lothar Charoux, Waldemar Cordeiro and others, he founded Grupo Ruptura and took part in writing the manifesto of abstract and concrete art. In the same year he won first prize for graphic design at the celebrations of the four-hundredth anniversary of São Paulo; in 1953 he received an acquisition award at the II São Paulo Biennial. In 1954, with Friar João Batista, he founded the furniture cooperative Unilabor. It proved successful and allowed him to leave the bank. In 1957, with Ruben Martins, Walter Macedo and Alexandre Wollner, he opened the studio Forminform, which worked on logos and corporate identity, and in 1964, with Aloísio Bione, he founded the furniture company Hobjeto. Both furniture companies went bankrupt during years of political instability and economic hardship.

In the 1960s he staged Pop Art events with Nelson Leirner: outdoor advertising billboards were taken down, reworked and returned to the street. In 1966, with Carlos Fajardo, Frederico Nasser, José Resende Filho, Leirner and Wesley Duke Lee, he founded Galeria Rex, an experiment with the art market. The gallery closed after a year, but the group went on working for more than twelve years.

In 1977 he returned to geometry and concrete art, taking Formica (a plastic laminate used for furniture) as his base material.

An exhibition of his archive in the 1990s was organised in Lausanne by his daughter Fabiana; it stirred interest in his early photographs. In 1998 his work was shown in the United States for the first time, at Sicardi-Sanders Gallery in Houston. His other awards include second prize at the XXI São Paulo Biennial (1991).

De Barros died in São Paulo on 17 April 1998, at the age of seventy-five. In 1999 a documentary by Michel Favre, “Geraldo de Barros: Sobras em Obras”, was released; it was produced by his daughter Fabiana.