Leonilson (1957–1993) is an artist who is both central and marginal in the history of Brazilian art. Central since he is the author of an inescapable oeuvre at the end of the 20th century, acknowledged in countless exhibitions, books, and even tattoos. He is also marginal because, with such a oeuvre, he doesn’t easily fit into the movements and generations of Brazilian art history. Above all, Leonilson is marginal since, at the end of the 1980s in Brazil, he was a gay man and, from mid-1991, living with HIV—he died from AIDS two years later, at the age of 36.

Working with drawing, painting, objects, embroidery, fabrics, and installations, Leonilson expresses his passions andemotions intensely in his works with themes such as love, abandonment, loss, loneliness, and illness. However, Leonilson also manifests his feelings about politics, as one can see in the work that lends its title to the exhibition, Agora e as oportunidades [Now and Opportunities], in other works from the minorities series, and in several illustrations made for the Barbara Gancia newspaper column from 1991 to 1993.

This exhibition focuses on the so-called late Leonilson, the artist’s mature phase in which he refined his language and his poetics, using increasingly fewer elements in his compositions—often with religious features—and reaching a truly sublime culmination in Instalação sobre duas figuras [Installation on Two Figures] (1993). Despite the diaristic nature of his work, it is crucial to understand the artist’s oeuvre not from a biographical approach—since he often combines truth and fiction, biography and fabulation—but rather through his monumental poetic construction, represented in images, materials, and texts.

The exhibition is divided into five rooms—each one devoted to a year of Leonilson’s production between 1989 and 1993—in the museum’s first-floor gallery and an additional section in the second sublevel mezzanine, with the illustrations for Barbara Gancia. More than three decades after his death, the artist keeps offering us new opportunities for reading,
inspiration, and signification. Leonilson’s persistent image, through artworks, exhibitions, books, films, theater, and tattoos, is that of a vibrant, multiple, and contradictory anti-hero. There is a bit of him in many of us.

Leonilson: Now and Opportunities
Curated by Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director, MASP, with curatorial assistance from Teo Teotonio