TEFAF 2025: Waldemar Cordeiro | English

PORTUGUESE

In 2025, we celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Waldemar Cordeiro’s birth. To honor his legacy, Luciana Brito Galeria (São Paulo, Brazil) and The Mayor Gallery (London, UK) are presenting a selection of works at TEFAF New York that spans the major phases of his artistic production, from 1949 to 1973. More than simply illustrating the timeless ideas Cordeiro developed, these works reflect his far-reaching impact on the transformation of visual art on a global scale, beginning in the 1950s. Today, he is widely recognized as a significant figure in international cultural history.

Waldemar Cordeiro was born in Italy in 1925 and, at the age of 21, emigrated to Brazil, where he soon became a central figure in the emergence of Brazilian contemporary art. In the early 1950s, he played a leading role in founding and shaping the concrete art movement, which he spearheaded through the establishment of Grupo Ruptura (1952). Conceived by the artist, the Ruptura Manifesto called for a new kind of art – revolutionary, independent, and grounded in the principles of space, time, and objectivity. His work from this period reveals a striking visual complexity combined with intelligent interplay of form and color.

Between 1960 and 1963, Waldemar Cordeiro entered his Intuitive Geometry phase, during which he began experimenting with hand-drawn lines, demonstrating an interest in perceptual psychology – a creative tool also used in his concrete phase, in the same way he had used the forms and colors of Brazil’s tropical vegetation. A piece from this period was featured in the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024.

In 1964, Cordeiro began incorporating found objects from everyday life into his compositions, calling them Popcretos – a term coined by poet Augusto de Campos to combine pop and concrete art. Inspired by the concept of the “open work,” developed by scholar Umberto Eco, he included active public participation in his work, along with political critiques of Latin American realities and global consumerism.

By the late 1960s, Cordeiro had become a pioneer in the field of computer-based art in Latin America. Using photographic sources, he developed his own methodology to explore visual transformations of figurative imagery, experimenting with the new possibilities offered by emerging technologies. In 1971, he organized Arteônica, the first international exhibition of computer art in Brazil, which definitively introduced electronic media into artistic discourse. The term Arteônica – coined by Cordeiro to unite art and electronics – remains unique in its ability to encompass all phases of electronic media in the history of art. His contributions in this area are widely regarded as both groundbreaking and visionary.