Often simple in composition, the art of Waltercio Caldas invites a host of complex questions about perception and space. Caldas challenges not only the way we look at his objects in the moment, but also our perspectives on art more generally. For decades he has been a central figure in Brazilian art. While his influence extends across much of the art world, he has remained largely underrecognized in the United States. To make this exceptional artist more widely known to the U.S. audience, the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin and the Fundação Iberê Camargo, a premier art organization in Porto Alegre, Brazil, have organized the exhibition The Nearest Air: A Survey of Works by Waltercio Caldas.
The exhibition catalog Waltercio Caldas is the first illustrated English-language publication to fully explore Caldas’s four-decade artistic trajectory, his influences, and his impact. The catalog includes essays by the exhibition’s curator, Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, director of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros; leading art critic Robert Storr, Dean of the Yale University School of Art, who investigates Caldas’s work in relationship to that of his international peers and its importance in the history of art; and renowned art historian Richard Shiff, modern and contemporary art professor at the University of Texas, who discusses key Caldas works that epitomize his investigation of the history of art. The catalog also includes a selected chronology of the artist’s career and a selected bibliography.

Waltercio Caldas

Arts & Photography

Shiff, Richard

Blanton Museum of Art

Caldas, Waltercio

Pérez-Barreiro, Gabriel

STORR, Robert

Individual Artists

University of Texas Press

Colorful and playful kinetic sculptures, experimental objects designed to be catalysts for community building, manifestos calling for joy and the negation of melancholy: these are the elements that have shaped The Geometry of Hope. The title of this richly illustrated, 340-page volume brings together two threads that epitomize postwar abstract art from Latin America: on the one hand, geometry, precision, clarity and reason; on the other, a utopian sense of hope. The book contains new scholarship by an international cast, with examinations of six key cities--Montevideo, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Caracas and Paris--as well as insightful essays on individual works of art. It comes to us via the Cisneros Graduate Seminar, a collaborative program of the Blanton Museum in Austin, Texas, and the renowned Fundación Cisneros, and covers more than four decades of art-making with works by 52 artists, among them Lygia Clark, Gego, Jesús Rafael Soto and Hélio Oiticica.

The Geometry of Hope: Latin American Abstract Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection

De Torres, Cecilia

Aldana, Erin

History & Criticism

Jorge Macchi, is one of Latin America's principal contemporary artists.

Jorge Macchi (Second Edition)

Fundacao Bienal de Artes Visuais do Mercosul

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