Antonio Bandeira {Brazil 1922 - 67}

Untitled         1958

gouache on wove-screen paper
12 3/4 x 9 3/4 inches
signed and dated Bandeira 58

The Fortaleza-born painter Antonio Bandeira began his career as a figurative artist but upon traveling to Paris in the mid-1940s soon became an adherent of French Tachisme or informal abstraction most notably through his close contact with the German painter Alfred Otto Wolfgand Schultz (aka Wols) and the French artist Camille Bryen. The three artists integrated the loosely-formed Banbryols (a play on their three last names). The short lived collective would become one of the leading groups to represent European Lyrical Abstraction, and although Bandeira returned to Brazil briefly in 1950 he continued to travel frequently and by the mid-1950s his career had taken on a truly international character with exhibitions in Paris, Brazil, London, and New York including participation in the newly founded São Paulo Biennial (in 1953, 1955 and 1959) and the Venice Biennial.