Augusto de Campos, Quasar, 1975, 1991, Silkscreen on cloth, 130 × 112 cm, Edition of 55 plus V AP
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Augusto de Campos (Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1931) is a Brazilian poet, translator, literary and music critic, and pioneering concrete poet, like his late older brother Haroldo de Campos. In 1952 he founded—together with his brother and Décio Pignatari—the poets’ group Noigandres, as well as the eponymous magazine. In this context, Augusto de Campos published Poetamenos (1953), a series of color poems, considered to be among the first instances of concrete poetry in Brazil. By experimenting with type and color and studying different typographic arrangements of words and letters on the page, de Campos conveys lyrical meaning by manipulating the position of letters on the paper and their sound rather than syntax. From 1980 onwards, de Campos intensified experiments with new media, presenting poems on electric billboards and testing with videotext and computer graphics. The polyvocal poem “Cidade/City/Cité,” originally from 1963, has been the object of several recreations and material explorations of Concrete Poetry with new technological media. He has been awarded Brazil’s Order of Cultural Merit (2015) and the Hungarian PEN Club’s Janus Pannonius Grand Prize for Poetry (2017). De Campos’s works have been exhibited in numerous museums and institutions, including the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York.
