Artist and designer who explored the possibilities of photography and was a champion of Brazilian concrete art.

Geraldo de Barros came to São Paulo with his family as a child. In 1941, he decided to pursue an artistic career in addition to his work at a bank. He took various classes in painting and engraving. In 1948, he discovered books on Paul Klee at the public library, and was greatly impressed. In Klee, he saw a great example of how an artist can transform the learned into something spontaneous. He studied Klee’s childlike scribbles in great depth, as is evidenced by his works from this period. It was at this time that de Barros began to experiment with photography. By mistake, he discovered the effects of superimposing film, and proceeded to deliberately implement these in his Fotoformas series, while at the same time experimenting with directly manipulating the negatives themselves. Thanks to a grant, he was able to travel to Europe for a year in 1951, where he established himself in Paris, visited Max Bill in Zurich, and came to Bern to see the works of Paul Klee. Back in São Paulo, de Barros and other artists founded the Grupo Ruptura. Their credo, in line with the modernisation and industrialisation of the country, was that art should be produced without a trace of an artistic signature, and if possible using industrial materials. Since de Barros was uninterested in the dogmatic stances of the various concrete art groups, he retreated for a while into the field of furniture design. Afterwards his painting took first a figurative direction before returning to concrete art in the 1980s, with works in melamine laminate.