Antonio Dias
(Campina Grande, 1944 – Rio de Janeiro, 2018)
Antonio Dias, was a Brazilian artist and graphic designer. He was a prominent figure during the concretist and Tropicália movements.
In 1957, when Antonio Dias moved to Rio de Janeiro with his family, he began working as a draughtsman and graphic designer, cultivating art as an autodidact in his spare time. In the early 1960s, Dias began frequenting the studio of Oswaldo Goeldi, the celebrated modernist printmaker, at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes.
In 1965 he won the painting award from the Biennale des Jeunes of Paris where he lived between 1967 and 1968. After May 1968, he was denied to have his French papers extended and decided to go to Italy, where he settled in Milan.
Antonio Dias’s works from the mid-1960s are distinguished by visceral red, black and white imagery, symbolic of the blood and the dirt of the urban underbelly, accentuated by the early stages of the military dictatorship in Brazil. The corporeal presence of the paintings is achieved by the addition of three-dimensional elements.