The artwork of Antonio Dias (1944–2018) uniquely captures the interwoven histories of Brazilian postwar realism and of European conceptualism in the 1960s and 1970s. By tracking Dias’s ever-shifting works and circulation as he moved from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, and then to Milan, Borderless Painting as Borderless Art provides the first in-depth study of the artist.
Sérgio B. Martins uses Dias’s trajectory as a lens to explore different approaches to avant-gardism and its crisis in Brazil, France, and northern Italy, weaving in the perspectives of figures such as Hélio Oiticica, Harald Szeemann, Pierre Restany, Giulio Paolini, and Tommaso Trini, as well as the Fluxus movement. The book ultimately argues that Dias pitted his formation in a semi-peripheral avant-garde against a post–avant-gardist milieu where commodity culture and market relations were far more pervasive and determinant vis-à-vis the arts scene.
Sérgio B. Martins is Associate Professor of Art History in the History Department at Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro and author of Constructing an Avant-Garde: Art in Brazil, 1949–1979.
"This book is the first in-depth study of one of the most important Brazilian artists of the 1960s and ’70s, whose spare, concentrated, and deeply rigorous work remains among the most innovative and trenchant articulations of conceptually oriented practice to emerge from Latin America. Bringing a host of new archival evidence to bear on the artist’s trajectory during the most critical years of his production, this finely textured account also offers profound insights into the transformation and crisis of multiple vanguard configurations of the postwar period."—Irene V. Small, Princeton University
"Borderless Painting as Borderless Art is exemplary in showing how exchanges between different approaches to neo-avant-gardism (and its crisis) in Brazil, France, and Northern Italy situate the work of Antonio Dias and how Dias's trajectory also redefines dominant understandings of modernist art history. The book presents unique and nuanced research and is a compelling read."—Kaira M. Cabañas, author of Immanent Vitalities: Meaning and Materiality in Modern and Contemporary Art
"Tracking the transnational career of the Brazilian artist Antonio Dias across two continents, Sérgio Martins's excellent study provides a welcome critique of existing histories of a seemingly borderless global conceptualism. Introducing a potent concept of semiperipherality, Martins demonstrates how the specificity of Dias's artistic trajectory not only delineates an emerging tension between neo-avant-garde and post-avant-garde positions but also sparks a short circuit between disparate social and cultural realities within the uneven system of global capitalism. Based on meticulous research, Martins's Borderless Painting as Borderless Art makes a major methodological intervention within current debates on the transcultural constitution of a global contemporary art."—Eric C. H. de Bruyn, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, Freie Universität Berlin
248 pp.7 x 9Illus: 102 color images
9780520422483$50.00|£42.00Hardcover
Apr 2026