Amílcar de Castro

Amílcar Augusto Pereira de Castro was a Brazilian artist, sculptor and graphic designer.

Career
Moving to Rio de Janeiro in 1953 de Castro began his career as a graphic designer with the magazines "Manchete" and "A Cigarra." He carried out the graphic redesign of the Jornal do Brasil newspaper in 1957-1959. In the sixties, though he was increasingly artistically more focused on sculpture, he undertook graphic design for several other Brazilian newspapers as well as working as a book designer for the publisher Editora Vozes.

From the late 1950s he focused on sculpture and was one of the leading figures of the Brazilian Neo-Concrete Movement. He participated in exhibitions with this group in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, in 1956. In 1959 he was one the signatories of the Neo-Concrete Manifesto alongside Ferreira Gullar, Franz Weissmann, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, Reynaldo Jardim, and Theon Spanudis which was published on 22 of March 1959 in Jornal do Brazil.

After receiving a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation and the "Foreign Travel" prize at the 15th National Salon for Modern Art in 1957 he travelled to the United States, basing himself in New Jersey. In 1971 he returned to Belo Horizonte dedicating himself to artistic and educational activities. He directed the Escola Guignard Foundation from 1974 to 1977 where he taught "bidimensional and tridimensional expression." He was Professor of Sculpture at the UFMG School of Fine Arts from 1979 to 1990 and of Sculpture at the Art Foundation of Ouro Preto-FAOP in 1979. One of his students was Shirley Paes Leme.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2024