Ferreira Gullar

Brazilian artist, born in São Luís do Maranhão, 1930, José Ribamar Ferreira, known as Ferreira Gullar was a poet, dramaturgist, translator and art critic; member of the Academia Brasileira de Letras. He discovered modern poetry as a child at the age of nine. At age 18 he began working as a newspaper editor and a year later published his first book, Um Pouco Acima do Chão. In 1951, he moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he worked as a journalist in several magazines and newspapers. In 1954, he launched his book, A Luta Corporal and participated in the initial phase of the concrete art movement and the 1ª Exposição de Arte Concreta, held in São Paulo, at MAM/SP. The following year he breaks with the concrete poets, Gullar disagrees with what he considers an excessive rationalism of concrete poetry and defends more subjectivity, which results in the creation of the neoconcrete movement, in which artists such as Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark participated. The Neoconcrete Manifesto was published in 1959, in Jornal do Brasil, and in that same year the 1ª Exposição Neoconcreta was held. The ideas of the movement are set forth in Teoria do Não Objeto, which Gullar also publishes in that year. In 1968, he is arrested and forced to exile. In Buenos Aires, he writes his best known and most admired book, Poema Sujo.
Ferreira Gullar is considered one of the most important poets and critics of Brazilian art. His work is marked by different phases of aesthetic research. He became an experimental poet, without following formulas, poetry should be reinvented at every instant. He thus took his poetic experiences to the limit of expression, creating the poem-book, the space-poem, and finally the poem-buried, this being his last neoconcrete work. Parallel to his poetic production, he builds a solid theoretical and critical work in the field of visual arts, being recognized as one of the great characters in the history of Latin American art as a whole.

Sources:
Text: http://cassiabomeny.com.br/en/artista/ferreira-gullar-2/