“Untitled”

José Resende is a sculptor and an influential artist in avant-garde movements since the 1960s. His most important group exhibitions include four editions of the São Paulo Biennial, the 1980 Paris Biennale, the 1988 Venice Biennale, the 1992 Kassel Documenta, the 1998 Sydney Biennale, and the 2001 Mercosul Biennale. Resende has had solo exhibitions in Brazil, Paraguay, and the United States. His works are part of the collections of the MAM – Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art of USP, both in São Paulo; MAM – Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro (Gilberto Chateaubriand collection); Hakone Open Air Museum (Japan); Seoul Olympic Park (South Korea); and the University of Hartford Museum (Connecticut, USA).

Resende studied with Wesley Duke Lee in the 1960s and, with him, Nelson Leirner, Geraldo de Barros, Carlos Fajardo and Frederico Nasser formed the Rex Group. In an ironic and humorous way, the group members edited the newspaper "Rex Time" and developed an exhibition space, the Rex Gallery and Sons, through which themes such as art vs. merchandise, the dominant criticism, and the place of the spectator were questioned. After that, at a time of strong political crisis in the country, he founded the Escola Brasil:, with the artists Carlos Fajardo, Frederico Nasser and Luiz Paulo Baravelli, whose proposal was to form a Center for Artistic Experimentation. In the 1970s, he was co-editor of the magazine "Malasartes", with nine other editors, among them Carlos Vergara, Baravelli, Carlos Zilio, Rubens Gerchman, Cildo Meireles, Ronaldo Brito and Waltercio Caldas.

The work "O passante" has a twelve-meter-high version that is on display in Largo da Carioca and is part of the Municipal Collection of Rio de Janeiro. For the 2001 exhibition "Arte Cidade", which featured works designed exclusively for the urban context, Resende raised six train cars at 45º above the ground. In the words of Ronaldo Brito, "with an almost volatile or almost amorphous appearance, José Resende's sculpture resists presentation through images. Light, instantaneous, or thick and truncated, on the very edge of individuation, such pieces do not require contemplation: observing and feeling them requires immediately experiencing them, reviewing their constructive articulations on one's own."