Untitled, 1999
Born in São Paulo in 1961, Monteiro began painting in 1981, and he cultivated his sculptural practice-which he considers an extension of his painting practice and vice versa-that same decade. Early in his career, Monteiro also cofounded the São Paulo artist collective Casa 7 with Carlito Carvalhosa, Fábio Miguez, Nuno Ramos, and Rodrigo Andrade. This influential group would invigorate Brazilian painting in new ways, bringing a Neo-Expressionist sensibility to their work and, by extension, to the center of the São Paulo art scene at the time. Today, Monteiro continues to live and work in São Paulo.
While his early assemblages were composed entirely of found wood, the artist has incorporated rope, cardboard, aluminum, and clay in his sculptures in more recent years. For Monteiro, the boundaries between painting and sculpture are null and void-tactility, physicality, and materiality, as well as interiority, are central to his work across both mediums. Unique plays of color, shape, line, and texture proliferate across the planes of his paintings and the surfaces of his sculptures, which often bear traces of the artist's own hand. In Monteiro's resulting "constellations"- specific arrangements of his paintings and sculptures that give rise to spirited exchanges-negotiations of negative space within and between the works "bring life to something lifeless," he has said. Movement and repetition are at the heart of much of his work in two- and three-dimensions.
In recent years, his work has figured in exhibitions at Pace in Palm Beach; Mendes Wood DM in São Paulo; Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo; Instituto Ling in Porto Alegre, Brazil; MAC Niterói Contemporary Art Museum in Rio de Janeiro; Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles; Lévy Gorvy in New York; Tomio Koyama in Tokyo; and other international venues. He has also participated in several editions of the São Paulo Bienal, in 1985, 1994, and 2013. In 2014, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired a large group of Monteiro's works-including paintings, sculptures, drawings, and gouaches. He is also represented in the collections of the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, and the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro.