Waldemar Cordeiro. Constellations. From Concrete Art to Computer Art

A pioneer of Concrete and Media Art in South America is being comprehensively honored in Germany for the first time: In the project room of the collection exhibition "The Story That Never Ends", the first German retrospective of the Brazilian artist, theorist and designer Waldemar Cordeiro (born 1925 in Rome - died 1973 in São Paulo, where he had lived since 1946) is opening at ZKM. As an influential pioneer of Concrete Art, Cordeiro played a decisive role in the history of Brazilian art during the 20th century. His diverse work ranges from abstract and geometric art to socially committed and computer-generated art. 

In the exhibition at ZKM, Waldemar Cordeiro's work is presented on the basis of four phases of his oeuvre: Concretismo, Geometria intuitiva, Popcreto and Arteônica. As one of the first artists in South America, Waldemar Cordeiro engaged with the then still new computer technology in the 1960s and was in close contact with pioneers and theorists of computer art such as Otto Beckmann (1908-97), Herbert W. Franke (1927-2022) and Hiroshi Kawano (1925-2012). From 1968, Cordeiro, together with the physicist Giorgio Moscati (born 1934), created works that are considered to be the first computer-generated artworks in Latin America.

The exhibition at the ZKM is based on the retrospective "Waldemar Cordeiro. A Singular Constellation" presented at The Mayor Gallery in London in 2024. In Karlsruhe, the exhibition will be augmented with photographs, letters and print material from the collection and archives of the ZKM which document Cordeiro’s connections to the international Computer Art movement. The exhibition ends with the first video artwork in South America - the groundbreaking work "M3×3" by Waldemar Cordeiro's daughter Analivia Cordeiro. In the course of the collection exhibition, further exhibitions will be presented in its project room.