Leonilson

I think I’m an inquisitive person. And I am ambiguous, completely. My pieces are all ambiguous. They don’t deliver the truth directly, but show an open vision. — Leonilson, 10 December 1992

Lisson is pleased to announce an exhibition of works spanning the short, prodigious career of Brazilian artist José Leonilson (1957-1993). Organized in collaboration with Projeto Leonilson and Almeida & Dale, the presentation traces the origins and evolution of his art, from the mixed-media assemblages of the mid-1970s, to the stylistic plurality of his drawings and paintings of the 1980s, through to the small-scale embroidery works that followed his HIV diagnosis in 1991.

Generally known – in his lifetime and since – as singularly Leonilson, the artist came of age during a formative period in Brazilian art and society; 1985 marked the end of the country’s twenty-one-year military dictatorship and the onset of a new phase of creative freedom. From an early age, he was influenced by the experimentalism of a previous generation of artists including Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark and Mira Schendel. Along with contemporaries associated with the Geração 80 movement, such as Leda Catunda and Beatriz Milhazes, Leonilson built on these forbears’ gradual turn away from the conceptualist precepts of the 1960s toward a more poetic, subjective mode of expression.