Borderless Painting as Borderless Art

"This book is the first in-depth study of one of the most important Brazilian artists of the 1960s and '70s, whose spare, concentrated, and deeply rigorous work remains among the most innovative and trenchant articulations of conceptually oriented practice to emerge from Latin America. Bringing a host of new archival evidence to bear on the artist's trajectory during the most critical years of his production, this finely textured account also offers profound insights into the transformation and crisis of multiple vanguard configurations of the postwar period."--Irene V. Small, Princeton University " Borderless Painting as Borderless Art is exemplary in showing how exchanges between different approaches to neo-avant-gardism (and its crisis) in Brazil, France, and Northern Italy situate the work of Antonio Dias and how Dias's trajectory also redefines dominant understandings of modernist art history. The book presents unique and nuanced research and is a compelling read."--Kaira M. Cabañas, author of Immanent Vitalities: Meaning and Materiality in Modern and Contemporary Art "Tracking the transnational career of the Brazilian artist Antonio Dias across two continents, Sérgio Martins's excellent study provides a welcome critique of existing histories of a seemingly borderless global conceptualism. Introducing a potent concept of semiperipherality, Martins demonstrates how the specificity of Dias's artistic trajectory not only delineates an emerging tension between neo-avant-garde and post-avant-garde positions but also sparks a short circuit between disparate social and cultural realities within the uneven system of global capitalism. Based on meticulous research, Martins's Borderless Painting as Borderless Art makes a major methodological intervention within current debates on the transcultural constitution of a global contemporary art."--Eric C. H. de Bruyn, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, Freie Universität Berlin