For almost 50 years, Brazilian-born New York–based artist Lydia Okumura (b. 1948), like her contemporaries Dorothea Rockburne and Robert Irwin, has explored the realm of geometric abstraction by challenging our perception of space in her sculptures, installations and works on paper. In the 1970s, as a young artist in her native São Paulo, she was introduced to Conceptual art, Minimalism, Land Art and Arte Povera through the Japanese art magazine Bijutsu Techou. These movements, along with Brazilian Concretism and Neoconcretism, influenced Okumura’s dynamic work in which she uses simple materials such as string, glass and paint to balance line, plane and shadow.

This handsome exhibition catalog, produced to accompany the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States at the University of Buffalo Art Gallery and to encourage a critical reassessment of Okumura’s oeuvre within art history, is a rich document of her minimal practice and independent vision. The catalogue includes an essay on Okumura and her work, by curator Rachel Adams; an account of vanguardism in Brazilian art from 1960 to 1975, by art historian Mari Rodriguez Binnie; a conversation between Adams and Okumura; and extensive photo documentation of Okumura’s work from the 1970s until today.

Edited by Rachel Adams & Charlie Tatum

Designed by Mark Owens with Sarah Cleeremans

Published by Sternberg Press and the UB Art Galleries
Printed in an edition of 1,200 copies

In English and Portuguese

Softcover, 112 pages, 48 b&w and 56 color images, 9.5 × 11.5 inches

ISBN: 978-3-95679-291-5