Hélio Oiticica is a key figure within the history of Brazilian modernism and contemporary art. As a young artist in the mid-1950s, Oiticica was involved with geometric abstraction, heavily influenced by Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian. In 1959, together with Lygia Clark, he became a leader of the Neo-Concretist movement in Rio de Janeiro.

Oiticica was only twenty years old when he began working on his Metaesquemas series, which would eventually comprise more than 350 compositions. The Metaesquemas [Meta-Schemes] were pivotal in the young artist’s career, marking the shift from two-dimensional to three-dimensional space that he would pursue in his practice in subsequent years. He later described this series as exercises in the “obsessive dissection of space” aimed at destabilizing the spatial conventions of Concrete painting, a rationalist movement that promoted geometric abstraction and had dominated art-making in Brazil since the early 1950s. Indeed, the dynamic compositions in Oiticica’s Metaesquemas introduced an unprecedented range of whimsicality, upending the primacy and stability of the grid. The vibrating picture planes also foreshadowed Oiticica’s ambition to transform viewers into active participants, a strategy that was formalized shortly thereafter in the 1959 manifesto of the Neo-Concrete movement, which included Oiticica as one of its main proponents.

This work on paper presents a group of black shapes tilting rhythmically toward each other in a mirrored disposition: an imaginary axis runs vertically through the work, dividing the composition into nearly symmetrical halves.