Hércules Barsotti

Hércules Rubens Barsotti (July 20, 1914 – December 21, 2010) was a Brazilian painter, graphic designer, scenographer and costume designer. He was a member of the Neo-Concrete Movement.

Early life and education Barsotti was born in São Paulo, Brazil. Barsotti began to work within abstraction around the beginning of the 1940s.

In the 1950s Barsotti worked as a textile and theater costume designer. At this time he began to come in contact with artists working within the Concrete Art movement in Brazil. In 1953 he created his first truly constructive art.

In 1954 along with his life partner and artist Willys de Castro, Barsotti founded Estúdio de Projectos Gráficos, an advertising design consultancy which operated for a decade.

Along with de Castro, Barsotti traveled to Europe in 1958 where they studied for one year. After returning to São Paulo in 1959 both de Castro and Barsotti joined the Neo-Concrete Movement.

In 1963 Barsotti abandoned his exploration of simple black and white compositions which he had explored earlier in his career and began to experiment with color and its effects on volume and movement. He exemplified formal elements related to the Neo-Concrete movement. Although technical is his own right, he was not affiliated with the Concretist group, and he created his own forms of art. His areas of expression is what separated him from the Concrete movement into the neo-concrete movement, but since he generally used formal and somewhat rigid geometric lines and shapes, he was considered part of the Neo-Concrete movement.

In the 1950s, he created many pieces of art with ink on paper that utilize lines to create aesthetically pleasing angles and space in his artwork. In 1970, he drew Estudos e Formas com los Angulos Cor I, which was drawn with pencil on paper. This includes geometric shapes, specifically what appears to be diagonal squares with lines connecting the top and bottom corners. This artwork came with his slight change in style in the 1960s to use monochromatic planes, which were toned-down with some geometric inflections. Another aspect of change in the 1960s was his exploration of colors with different formats. He started to use various geometric shapes in rhythmic sequences to explore different areas of space in his drawings. As an act to counter the Concrete movement, he used colors that was specifically rejected in the Concrete movement. This was a significant way that many of the Neo-Concrete movement artists used to express themselves uniquely in a way that set them apart from the Concrete movement.

Many of Barsotti's later artwork presented as acrylic paint on a shaped canvas. These canvases would be in the form of simple shapes, such as a circle, square or triangle. Each have two shades of the same color with a slit in the middle. These particular paintings were a part of Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and made in 1996.

Selected exhibitions Solo exhibitions 1974: Obras recentes, Galeria Arte Global (São Paulo, Brazil) 1981: Gabinete de Arte Raquel Arnaud Babenco (São Paulo, Brazil) 1988: "Aventuras da ordem: Hércules Barsotti e Willys de Castro," Gabinete de Arte Raquel Arnaud Babenco (São Paulo, Brazil) 1994: Desenhos, 1953– 1960, Galeria Silvio Nery (São Paulo, Brazil) 2000: Museu de Arte Moderna (São Paulo, Brazil)

Group exhibitions 1959: V Bienal Internacional de Arte de São Paulo (São Paulo, Brazil) 1960: "Konkrete Kunst: 50 Jahre Entwicklung" (Zürich, Switzerland) – traveling exhibition, June 8 – August 14, 1960 1977: "Projecto construtivo brasileiro na arte. 1950 – 1962," Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil); Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (São Paulo, Brazil) 1984: "Tradição e ruptura. Síntese de arte e cultura brasileras," Fundação Bienal de São Paulo (São Paulo, Brazil) 1987: XIX Bienal Internacional de Arte de São Paulo (São Paulo, Brazil) 2000: Heterotopías. Media siglo sin lugar. 1918–1968, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid) 2000: Século 20. Arte do Brasil, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Centro de Arte Moderna José de Azeredo Perdigão (Lisbon) 2003: Cuasi-corpus. Arte concreto y neoconcreto de Brasil, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Internacional Rufino Tamayo (Mexico City) 2004: Inverted Utopias. Avant-Garde Art in Latin America, Museum of Fine Arts Houston (Houston, Texas) 2006: Cruce de Miradas. Visiones de America Latina. Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Museo Palacio de Bellas Artes (Mexico City) 2006: The Sites of Latin American Abstraction. Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (Miami, Florida) [Traveling exhibition] 2007: Geometry of Hope. Latin American Abstract Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection. Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas Austin (Austin, Texas); Grey Art Gallery, New York University (New York) 2010: Das Verlangen nach Form– O Desejo da Forma. Neoconcretismo und zeitgenössische Kunst aus Brasilien, Akademie der Künste (Berlin, Germany) 2010: Vibración. Moderne Kunst aus Lateinamerika. The Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection Bundeskunsthalle (Bonn, Germany)

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