At the age of 68, Angelo Venosa, a Brazilian plastic artist of Italian descent, died today (17th) in Rio de Janeiro. The sculptor suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a degenerative disease he had been living with since 2019. Venosa had been hospitalized in a private hospital in the city since last Saturday (15).
Considered one of the great names of the so-called Geração 80, Venosa stood out, however, for his dedication to sculpture, and not to painting, the main trend of the group.
Angelo Augusto Venosa was born on August 14, 1954, in São Paulo, but moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1974, where he graduated in industrial design at the Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial. He did postgraduate studies at the School of Fine Arts at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).
He participated in the Bienal de São Paulo (1987); the exhibition Brazilian Art of the 20th Century (1987), at the Musée d’Art Moderne de La Ville in Paris; the Venice Biennale (1993); and the Mercosul Biennial (2005).
In 2012, celebrating 30 years of his career, the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro (MAM) dedicated a solo exhibition to him, which was then taken to the Pinacoteca de São Paulo; the Palácio das Artes, in Belo Horizonte; and the Aloisio Magalhães Museum of Modern Art, in Recife. In 2013, Editora Cosac Naify published the second book about his work.
Angelo Venosa has several public sculptures installed in the country, in places such as the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro (Jardins), the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo (Jardim do Ibirapuera), the Pinacoteca de São Paulo (Jardim da Luz) , Copacabana/Leme Beach, in Rio de Janeiro, Santana do Livramento, Rio Grande do Sul, José Ermírio de Moraes Park, in Curitiba, and Museu do Açude, in Rio de Janeiro.
One of Venosa’s characteristics was the creation of innovative pieces, using varied materials. His sculptures from the early 1980s combine natural materials and industrialized products.
From the early 1990s onwards, Venosa began to work with materials such as marble, wax, lead and even animal teeth, which led her works to resemble anatomical structures such as vertebrae and bones.
His first solo exhibition was in 1985, at the Centro Empresarial Rio Art Gallery. The last individual shows took place in 2021, in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
Source: CNN Brasil
