Artur Barrio

Barrio returned to Portugal during the Portuguese revolution in 1974.In 1975 he moved to Paris, and then in 1981 to Amsterdam. He had an solo exhibition in artist initiative Schottenburch, Amsterdam in 1981. Currently, he lives successively in Amsterdam, Aix-en-Provence and Rio de Janeiro.

In 1970 he created Situação…DEFL…+s+…ruas…Abril…(Unleashing confusion on the streets…Situation) consisting of “the placement of five hundred plastic bags containing blood, nails, dung, waste, and other debris in downtown Rio during the peak of the dictatorship’s repression”

Artur Barrio himself rejects art categories. In his “MANIFEST: against the art categories, against the salons, against the awards, against the jury, against the art critique” (Rio de Janeiro February 1970), Barrio explains his discontent with the top down view of art imposed by an aesthetic elite. In his view, this elite prescribes the materials necessary to create art. These materials were out of reach to Barrio and much of the population of the Third World at the time. His use of inexpensive materials (garbage, toilet paper and urine) was a rejection of the aesthetic elite and the art world they controlled, including the definitions of art categories, salons, awards, juried shows, and critics.

For much of Artur Barrio's career, Brazil was in the hands of a military dictatorship after the coup d'état in 1964.

Barrio was born in Porto, Portugal, in 1945. In 1952, he spent six months in Angola “where he discovered the African culture.” He then moved to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1955. In 1967, he attended the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes (School of Fine Arts), one of the centers of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. His teachers included Onofre Penteado, Abelardo Zaluar, Mário Barata and Ítalo Campofiorito.