Cildo Meireles Biography, Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth and Family

From March to July 2014 a major retrospective of Meireles’s work was presented at Milan’s HangarBicocca. It featured twelve of his most important works. Another important retrospective took place at SESC Pompeia from September 2019 to February 2020. In the exhibition entitled “Entrevendo” (Glimpsing) many of his most noteworthy installations were on display and an important catalogue was created for the exhibition.

The first extensive presentation of the artist’s work in the UK opened at Tate Modern in October 2008. Meireles was the first Brazilian artist to be given a full retrospective by Tate. This exhibition then moved to the Museu d’Art Contemporani in Barcelona, and later to the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City until January 10, 2010.

In 1999, Meireles was honoured with a Prince Claus Award and in 2008 he won the Velazquez Plastic Arts Award, presented by the Ministry of Culture of Spain.

A retrospective of his work was presented at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 1999. It then traveled to the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro and the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art. In conjunction with the exhibition, a book entitled Cildo Meireles, was published by Phaidon Press (1999).

An art project with political undertones that was designed to reach a mass-audience. This project manifested in multiple ways, two of the most well-known being the Coca-Cola project, and the Banknote project. Insertions Into Ideological Circuits was based upon three principles as defined by Meireles: 1) In society there are certain mechanisms for circulation (circuits); 2) these circuits clearly embody the ideology of the producer, but at the same time they are passive when they receive insertions into the circuit; 3) and this occurs whenever people initiate them. The goal of Insertions… was to literally insert some kind of counter-information or critical thought into a large system of circulated information. Meireles inserted something that is physically the same, though ideologically different, into a pre-existing system in order to counteract the original circuit without disrupting it. The project was achieved by printing images and messages onto various items that were already widely circulated and which had value discouraging them being destroyed, such as Coca-Cola bottles (which were recycled by way of a deposit scheme) and banknotes. Meireles screen-printed texts onto the Coca-Cola bottles that were supposed to encourage the buyer to become aware of their personal role in a consumerist society. The project simultaneously conveyed anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist messages. Building off of that concept, Meireles also used money as a theme and produced his own replica banknotes and coins (1974–1978) which appeared very similar to genuine Brazilian and US currency but with zero denominations clearly written on them, e.g. Zero Dollar. Mieireles also wrote critiques of the Brazilian government on the banknotes, such as “Who killed Herzog?” (in reference to journalist Vladimir Herzog), “Yankees go home!” and “Direct elections.”

A minimalist sculpture, on a Lilliputian scale: Meireles calls it an example of “humiliminimalism” – a humble brand of minimalism. He wanted it to be even smaller, “but when [he] sanded it down to [his] nails, [he] lost patience and stopped at nine millimeters.” Unlike most minimalist sculptures it is no mere object, but it is meant to be as richly symbolic, sensuous and potent as an amulet. Each half of the tiny 9mm by 9mm by 9mm cube is made of pine and oak. These two types of wood are considered sacred by the Tupi people of Brazil. The title refers to an unofficial geographical (and metaphysical) region that lies to the west of Tordesillas. According to Meireles in a statement he made about the artwork in 1970, this region is “the wild side, the jungle in one’s head, without the lustre of intelligence or reason…our origins.” It is a place where “there are only individual truths.” In the same statement, he notes that he wants Southern Cross to be perceived as a physical representation of the memory of the Tupi (“people whose history is legends and fables”) and a warning to modernity of the growing self-confidence of the primordial which will eventually result in an overtaking of the urban by the natural. Meireles’ statement is also political. It is a caution against indifference, especially against indifference towards Brazil’s fading indigenous population. The tiny cube is meant to be placed alone in the middle of an empty room in order to emphasize the reality and the power of indigenous belief systems in the context of Eurocentric modernism.

During his time in rural Brazil, Meireles learned the beliefs of the Tupi people which he later incorporated into some of his works in order to highlight their marginalization in, or complete disappearance from, Brazilian society and politics. Installations which contain allusions to the Tupi include Southern Cross (1969–70) and Olvido (1990). Meireles cites Orson Welles’ 1938 radio broadcast The War of the Worlds as one of the greatest works of art of the 20th century because it “seamlessly dissolved the border between art and life, fiction and reality.” Recreating this concept of total audience investment was an important artistic goal of Meireles that is seen throughout his body of work.

He was one of the founders of the Experimental Unit of the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro in 1969 and in 1975, edited the art magazine Malasartes.

Meireles has stated that drawing was his main artistic medium until 1968, when he altogether abandoned expressionistic drawing in favor of designing things that he wanted to physically construct. A topic that he especially explored in his art was the concept of the ephemeral and the non-object, art that only exists with interaction, which prompted him to create installation pieces or situational art. This led to his Virtual Spaces project, which he began in 1968. This project was “based on Euclidian principles of space” and sought to show how objects in space can be defined by three different planes. He modeled this concept as a series of environments made to look like corners in rooms.

Meireles considers his first exhibition to have taken place in 1965, when one of his canvases and two of his drawings were accepted by the Segundo Salão Nacional de Arte Moderna in Brasilia.

Meireles unintentionally participated in a political demonstration in April 1964, when he was sixteen years old. He has cited this moment has his “political awakening” and began to take an interest in student politics. In 1967 he moved to Rio de Janeiro and studied at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes.

Following the military coup in 1964, Meireles became involved in political art. When Meireles was “first getting started as an artist,” governmental censorship of various forms of media, including art, was standard in Brazil. Meireles found ways to create art that was subversive but subtle enough to make public by taking inspiration from Dadaist art, which he notes had the ability to seem “tame” and “ironic.” In the early 1970s he developed a political art project that aimed to reach a wide audience while avoiding censorship called Insertions Into Ideological Circuits, which was continued until 1976. Many of his installation pieces since this time have taken on political themes, though now his art is “less overtly political.”

He began his study of art in 1963 at the District Federal Cultural Foundation in Brasilia, under the Peruvian painter and ceramist Felix Barrenechea. In the late 1960s, Meireles discovered the work of Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, thereby introducing him to the Brazilian Neo-Concrete movement. These artists, as well as Meireles, were all concerned with blurring the boundary between what is art and what is life, and responding to current political situations within their pieces.

Cildo Meireles (born 1948) is a Brazilian conceptual artist, installation artist and sculptor. He is noted especially for his installations, many of which express resistance to political oppression in Brazil. These works, often large and dense, encourage a phenomenological experience via the viewer’s interaction.

Meireles was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1948. From an early age, Meireles showed a keen interest in drawing and spatial relations. He was especially interested in how this has been explored in animated film. His father, who encouraged Meireles’ creativity, worked for the Indian Protection Service and their family traveled extensively within rural Brazil.