An autodidact who captured his impressions of the city in geometric compositions.

Alfredo Volpi immigrated from Italy to São Paulo with his family as a young child. A trained flat-pattern decorative painter, he began working as an artist in the 1930s. Alongside a cohort of other self-taught artists, he became a “Sunday painter” and would travel to the outskirts of the city to record folk scenes in the form of small paintings. He was especially interested in the façades of the houses, and the flags with which the villages were adorned during folk festivals, which found their way into his works in the form of more abstract elements. The ships in seaside towns, with their masts, sails, and flags, also provided a basis for his increasingly geometrically abstracted paintings, which were described by art critics as “spontaneous geometry”. His uneven application of paint and delicate colour combinations are hallmarks of his paintings. As an autodidact, Volpi rarely commented on matters of theory. He is, however, responsible for introducing the next generation of artists to the work of Paul Klee. Volpi served as something of a bridge connecting the second generation of modern artists with the concrete art that would later emerge in the 1950s.