Antonio Dias, the Brazilian artist, has died. Dias, whose work came to the fore during the Brazilian dictatorship, was prominent in both the concretist and tropicalia movements. His art from the early 1960s spoke of violence, sex, censorship, the police state and the threat of nuclear war. ‘All the topics that I experienced on a daily basis while living in Brazil’. In 1966 Dias, like many Brazilian artists of the time, went to Paris and the work began to build in wider political narratives.
The artist briefly abandoned figuration after moving to Milan, but by the 1973 Dias had began his series The Illustrations of Art [Uncovering the Cover-Up and Tazebao/The Shape of Power], silkscreen reproductions of magazines and newspaper covers that had been modified by the artist. In 1977 he spent five months in Nepal producing handmade paper with local artisans, which he transported back to Italy and used over a twenty-year period in the series Nepalese Papers.
While Dias’s work was included in Tate Modern’s 2015 exhibition The World Goes Pop, the artist disliked being termed a Pop artist. ‘It’s not my party’ he said. Born 1944 in Campina Grande, Paraiba, Dias lived most of his life between Rio de Janeiro and Milan.
