Oiticica | The Mundanity of Beauty

I spent a wonderful afternoon at the Tate Modern on Monday, and caught the Oiticica exhibition. If you’re in London, I highly recommend it.

I thought the curation was excellent: a full sense of progression in the artist’s ideas. In the case of Oiticica, whose native Brazil is so famous for it’s colour and flamboyance, this was all about the way that “gradually colour is liberated from the picture plane and given spatial form in further series of works, which include suspended paintings and reliefs, sculptural objects, penetrable environments and ‘habitable paintings’ – capes, tents and banners designed to be worn or inhabited while moving to the rhythm of samba.”

With the heightened eye that wandering a gallery can bring, I was amused to find a highly fidgety and clearly very bored member of gallery staff in the same room as the piece above. Clearly beauty becomes mundane with time; I was transfixed as he texted mates, fiddled with his radio, munched a Snickers and scratched his nether regions. Brilliant.

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