Cildo Meireles is a conceptual artist with an international reputation, who creates objects and installations that directly lead the viewer into a complete sensory experience (synesthesia). In it, he questioned, among other issues, the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1984) and the country's dependence on the global economy.
Cildo Meireles has played a key role in national and international artistic production, positioning himself in the transition of Brazilian art between the neo-concretist production of the early 1960s and that of his own generation, already influenced by the proposals of conceptual art, installations and performances. Meireles's works reflect not only the specific political and social issues of Brazil, but also general aesthetic problems and the artistic object, such as the fallibility of human perception, communication processes, the conditions of the viewer or the relationship of the work. of art with the market.
During the 1970s and 1980s, Meireles produced a series of works that severely criticized the military dictatorship —works such as Tiradentes: totem monumento ao preso político or Introdução a una nova crítica, which consists of a store on which stands a common chair lined with nail tips—, works of a political nature by the artist that are always accompanied by an investigation of language. Inserções em circuito ideológico: Projeto Coca Cola, for example, consisted of writing, on a Coca Cola bottle, one of the most eminent symbols of North American imperialism, the phrase “Yankees go home”, to later return it to circulation. In addition to the political issues, the project made reference to all problematization carried out by the avant-garde movements and by Marcel Duchamp at the beginning of the century; a kind of "ready made" in reverse.
Another of his works, called Cruzeiro zero, is a faithful replica of a cruzeiro note (the current currency at that time) that has no value and the historical and heroic figures will be replaced by the photograph of a Brazilian Indian and a patient from a psychiatric hospital. There is a critique, a commentary on superinflation and the devaluation of the cruzeiro, this work plays with traditional notions of the nature and "value" of art and the marginalization of Brazil in the international art world.
A retrospective of his work was presented in 1999 at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, organized by Dan Cameron and Gerardo Mosquera. The exhibition then traveled to the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro and the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo. A book entitled Cildo Meireles (Phaidon Press, 1999), was published simultaneously with the exhibition.
In 1999 Cildo Meireles won a Prince Claus Award and in 2008 the important Velázquez Prize for Plastic Arts, granted by the Spanish Ministry of Culture.
In 2013, there was a major exhibition in Madrid of Meireles, organized by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, co-organized by the Museo Serralves in Porto and AngarBicocca in Milan. It involved a review of modernity in Latin America, and especially in Brazil, with works by Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark or Lygia Pape.
