24 Facts About Cildo Meireles

Cildo Meireles was born on 1948 and is a Brazilian conceptual artist, installation artist and sculptor.

Cildo Meireles is noted especially for his installations, many of which express resistance to political oppression in Brazil.

From an early age, Meireles showed a keen interest in drawing and spatial relations.

Cildo Meireles was especially interested in how this has been explored in animated film.

Cildo Meireles said that he was startled by an impoverished man wandering through the trees.

The next day, the young Cildo Meireles went to investigate, but the man was gone and only a small but perfect hut the man had apparently made the night before remained.

Cildo Meireles began his study of art in 1963 at the District Federal Cultural Foundation in Brasilia, under the Peruvian painter and ceramist Felix Barrenechea.

Cildo Meireles unintentionally participated in a political demonstration in April 1964, when he was sixteen years old.

Cildo Meireles has cited this moment has his "political awakening" and began to take an interest in student politics.

Cildo Meireles has stated that drawing was his main artistic medium until 1968, when he altogether abandoned expressionistic drawing in favor of designing things that he wanted to physically construct.

Cildo Meireles modeled this concept as a series of environments made to look like corners in rooms.

When Cildo Meireles was "first getting started as an artist," governmental censorship of various forms of media, including art, was standard in Brazil.

Cildo Meireles was one of the founders of the Experimental Unit of the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro in 1969 and in 1975, edited the art magazine Malasartes.

In 1999, Cildo Meireles was honoured with a Prince Claus Award and in 2008 he won the Velazquez Plastic Arts Award, presented by the Ministry of Culture of Spain.

Cildo Meireles inserted something that is physically the same, though ideologically different, into a pre-existing system in order to counteract the original circuit without disrupting it.

Cildo Meireles screen-printed texts onto the Coca-Cola bottles that were supposed to encourage the buyer to become aware of their personal role in a consumerist society.

Cildo Meireles wanted the participant to experience psychological tension between the appreciation of the sonic and the appreciation of the visual.

Cildo Meireles wanted the participant to experience feelings of awareness and attentiveness that come from walking a labyrinth.

Cildo Meireles' Babel acknowledges the multiplicity of language that resulted from the Tower's destruction in the story.

Paul Herkenhoff points out that Babel has autobiographical meaning for Cildo Meireles, as radio was a common method of widespread communication in Brazil during the artist's youth.

Cildo Meireles considers his first exhibition to have taken place in 1965, when one of his canvases and two of his drawings were accepted by the Segundo Salao Nacional de Arte Moderna in Brasilia.

In conjunction with the exhibition, a book entitled Cildo Meireles, was published by Phaidon Press.

Cildo Meireles was the first Brazilian artist to be given a full retrospective by Tate.

From March to July 2014 a major retrospective of Cildo Meireles's work was presented at Milan's HangarBicocca.