Mary Vieira (1927–2001) was a Brazilian sculptor. She was born and raised in Minas Gerais. She at the studied with

Alberto da Veiga Guignard Alberto da Veiga Guignard also known as Alberto Guignard or Guignard (25 February 1896 — 25 June 1962) was a Brazilian painter who became renowned for his depictions of the landscapes of Minas Gerais. Guignard was born in Nova Friburgo in the ...

Belo Horizonte Belo Horizonte (, ; ) is the sixth-largest city in Brazil, with a population around 2.7 million and with a metropolitan area of 6 million people. It is the 13th-largest city in South America and the 18th-largest in the Americas. The metropol ...

. She also studied sculpture with

Franz Weissmann Franz Josef Weissmann (September 15, 1911 – July 18, 2005) was a Brazilian sculptor born in Austria, emigrating to Brazil while he was eleven years old. Geometric shapes, like cubes and squares, are strongly featured in his works. He was one ...

and Amilcar de Castro. In 1947, she exhibited in Belo Horizonte Municipality’s Hall of Brazilian Young Artists.

Mary Vieira in Europe

In 1951, Mary Vieira settled in Europe to work with the Swiss artist

Max Bill Max Bill (22 December 1908 – 9 December 1994) was a Swiss architect, artist, painter, typeface designer, industrial designer and graphic designer. Early life and education Bill was born in Winterthur. After an apprenticeship as a silversmith ...

. In 1953, Vieira won the Rio de Janeiro’s Museum of Modern Art “Brazilian Sculpture” Award in São Paulo’s 2nd Biennial. In 1954, at Bill's invitation, she participated in the Constructivist Gruppe Allianz’s last exhibition. In 1957, Mary Vieira married Italian poet and critic Carlo Belloli, intensifying a key intellectual dialog for her aesthetic journey. The couple lived and worked between Switzerland, Italy, and Brazil. In Europe, she delved into her proposals of dynamic shaped sculptures that are successively classified as: monovolumes, multivolumes, polyvolumes, and intervolumes. One of her best known pieces, "Polyvolume: Meeting Point," was fabricated between 1960 and 1970 for installation in the Itamaraty Palace in Brazil's new capital, Brasilia. The artist is recognized by international critics as one of kinetic art’s major representatives. In 1966, she was given the “International Marinetti Award for Plastic Research on Kinevisual Expression” on the occasion of the 20th foundation anniversary of the “Salons des Réalités Nouvelles” in Paris’s Municipal Museum of Modern Art.

Mary Vieira around the world

Many of her art pieces are installed in public places in Brazil, such as Belo Horizonte’s Rio Branco Square; São Paulo’s Ibirapuera Park; and Brasília’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs; and abroad, such as the Basel University Library; Italy’s Monte Castello; and in Zurich’s Lake Seefeldquai Park. Further to her sculptures, she developed a number of projects as urbanist, graphic designer, and teacher. She took part in individual as well as collective exhibitions in Europe, Brazil and United States, being awarded a number of important prizes for her work. Mary Vieira died in Basel in 2001.

Mary Vieira and her work

Mary Vieira used to call herself a plastic ''ideaer''. She anticipated divisions between the categories of drawing, painting, sculpture and architecture would be extinguished, and considered interdisciplinarity to be key for the evolution of art. The main concepts in her work are absolutely contemporary. Taking along some models she had idealized before in Brazil, she moved to Switzerland in 1951. In 1952, she was invited to publish the ''Zeiten einer Zeichnung'' series for Spirale, major concretist publishers of the time. And there lies the whole essence of her oeuvre, which unfolds from concretism to kinetic art, or, more precisely, to cinevisualism. As Italian critic and poet Carlo Belloli pointed out, Mary Vieira’s oeuvre ''summons the spectator to art''. The coherence, the precision, and the comprehensiveness of the artist’s aesthetic view have never been totally displayed in her home country.

Mary Vieira and her archive

The Mary Vieira Archive is managed by ISISUF—Isituto Internazionale di Studi sul Futurismo, Milano, Italy.Istituto Internazionale di Studi sul Futurismo, Milano, Italy, Collections, http://www.isisuf.org/collections/

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