Ana Avelar is a professor of Theory, Criticism and History of Art at the University of Brasília. She has held exhibitions in various institutional spaces and participates in juries and commissions in the area. In 2019, she was selected by the Exchange of Curators, promoted by the Latitude project, of the Brazilian Association of Contemporary Art-ABACT in partnership with the Getty Research Institute, USA. She writes regularly about abstract art produced in Brazil in the second post-war period and currently.

Renata Rocco obtained her postdoctoral at the Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of São Paulo – MAC USP (2023), has a master’s degree (2013) and a doctorate (2018) from the Interunit Postgraduate Program in Aesthetics and History of Art at USP holding grants in all stages. She was a collaborating professor at the same museum (2021-2022) and participated in the curatorial team of the exhibitions: “Projetos para um Cotidiano Moderno no Brasil, 1920- 1960” (2021-2022), “Art Déco Brasileiro. Donation Fulvia and Adolpho Leirner” (2022-2023) and “4 in 1 – USP museums” (2023-2024). She is the author of articles and book chapters published on modern art in Brazil and Italy on the first editions of the São Paulo Biennial.

Abstract
Born in 1935 in Meina and settled in São Paulo during World War II, Maria Bonomi has a central role in contemporary Brazilian art. In 1952, she returned to her homeland, studied with Enrico Prampolini in Rome and worked with him on a set design project. Their professional relationship continued over the years through correspondence discussing art and its concepts. At that time, Bonomi visited exhibitions and artists such as Marino Marini, Alberto Magnelli and Mario Sironi. She met Emilio Vedova in São Paulo, in 1954, thanks to a grant he received at the São Paulo Biennial. Years later, Bonomi studied and collaborated with him in Venice, and together, they travelled around Europe, visiting museums and art galleries. According to Bonomi, with Prampolini she became interested in polymeric work, whereas with Vedova, she came into contact with his “free stroke, the explosion of gesture and the explosion of paint”. Both lessons are evident in the artist’s work. Thus, our proposal is to explore Bonomi’s body of work and its circulation in Rome, Milan, Venice and São Paulo, in the the 1950s. We will discuss her contacts with Italian artists and how they appear in her pioneering and experimental abstract production, developed in the Brazilian art scene from the mid-20th century onwards. To this end, we will use, as theoretical foundations, feminist studies by South-African theorist Griselda Pollock and Brazilian curator Sheila Leirner, whose ideas help to understand Bonomi’s unprecedented place in the Brazilian abstract art scene, and, at the same time, provides a transnational view of similar cases.

Image: Naufrágio. woodcut, 15 x 20 cm, 1955. Copyright Maria Bonomi.