The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

What might it feel like to walk around in a painting or drink a color?

In the late 1950s, such questions bedeviled the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica, resulting in some of the first environmental installations—and now an exhibition at New York's Galerie Lelong.

Oiticica, who lived from 1937 to 1980, was the son of a Rio de Janeiro photographer and entomologist. Wide-eyed and well-spoken, the artist began in the 1950s to cut large, flat boards into shapes that he dangled from the ceiling in increasingly elaborate arrangements. A few years later, he was constructing entire rooms using the same ordinary materials used to build Brazil's slums, or favelas. The hallways of his structures were often partitioned by colorful fabric panels, because he wanted people to experience art by walking through it.

Installation art is ubiquitous now, but these ideas—and his sociopolitical nod to the favelas—made Oiticica a maverick. At the time, high art was still largely created to view, not pass through, according to Mary Sabbatino, the gallery's vice president who organized the show, "Hélio Oiticica: Penetrables," on view through June 16.

Oiticica, Ms. Sabbatino says, is "still a discovery to a lot of Americans." London's Tate Modern and Houston's Museum of Fine Arts did a major survey of his work several years ago.

A highlight of the Lelong show is "Penetrável Filtro" ("Filter Penetrable," 1972), a room-filling maze whose path is occasionally blocked by yellow and blue plastic strips that viewers must brush past, as if in a miniature car wash. As they progress, they begin to hear various recordings of writers like Gertrude Stein reading one of her own novels, "The Making of Americans," its repetitive rhythm echoing their own circuitous walk. When viewers reach the final chamber, they see a table with plastic cups and a dispenser of orange juice, available to drink—orange being one of Oiticica's beloved sunset hues. (The gallery says that visitors have already gone through 60 bottles.)

For his younger brother Cesar Oiticica, such graceful codas remain bittersweet. After the artist died of a stroke at age 42, Cesar and a younger brother, Claudio, formed the Projeto Hélio Oiticica to foster interest in Hélio's art. Two years ago, a fire caused by a faulty air conditioner destroyed some works. But many were salvaged and restored, and the works on view come from the Projeto's collection. "Even after 60 years, they feel unique," Cesar Oiticica said.

 

 

 

A version of this article appeared May 19, 2012, on page C14 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A Pioneer of Walk-Through Art.