Biography

Claiming, “my role as an artist is to discipline the chaos regarding information,” Abraham Palatnik organized the patterns in technology and nature into art, becoming a pioneer of the Op Art movement and the founder of the technological movement in Brazilian art. Trained as a painter, he moved away from the conventions of this medium and towards abstraction and technology in the late 1940s. He created his first “Kinechromatic Devices” in 1949, one of which, a motorized light sculpture which cast a play of light and shadow into space, was shown at the first Bienal de São Paulo (1951). It was met with critical acclaim, as were the many optical experiments that followed. These include abstract paintings on glass and compositions based on magnetic fields, to name only a handful of Palatnik’s ongoing investigations into art, technology, and perception itself.