Hyperallergic Remembers Brazilian Poet and Art Critic Ferreira Gullar

Brazilian poet and art critic Ferreira Gullar died of pneumonia over the weekend at the age of 86. "In art," Elisa Wouk Almino writes "Gullar is perhaps best known for penning the Neo-Concrete manifesto in 1959, a movement in Rio de Janeiro spearheaded by Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, both good friends of Gullar’s, which rejected the more formal, rationalist approach of Concrete Art in favor of participatory sculptures and installations." Gullar's poetry has always "riddled with puns that designed shapes and patterns on the page, to ones that you could actually inhabit." We'll pick up with Almino's remembrance of Gullar there:

in “poema enterrado” (“buried poem”), the viewer steps into a cube about 9-feet deep to find three smaller cubes stacked within each other like Russian dolls. Beneath the small cubes, which the viewer can unstack, lies the word “buried.”

In 1964, the year of the military coup in Brazil, Gullar abandoned the Neo-Concrete movement, deeming it elitist. A member of the Communist Party, Gullar went on to be persecuted by the military dictatorship and fled the country for Moscow, Santiago, Lima, and Buenos Aires, where he wrote what many believed to be his masterpiece, “Dirty Poem” (1976), recently re-published into English by New Directions with a translation by Leland Guyer. Like many Brazilian artists living in exile at the time, Gullar expressed intense longing for and disappointment toward his native country in “Dirty Poem,” at once a reminiscence of his childhood in the northeast of Brazil and an evocation of the nightmarish repression and injustices he witnessed and experienced. When he returned to Brazil in 1977, he was once again tortured and imprisoned.

Learn more about Gullar at Hyperallergic.