Arthur Omar
Arthur Omar (born
1948) is a Brazilian contemporary artist. Omar is a
video artist,
photographer,
filmmaker, and
installation artist.
Omar works with cinema, video, photographic installations, music, poetry, and drawing. He also writes essays and theoretical reflections on the process of creation and the nature of images. Themes such as aesthetic ecstasy, sensory and social violence, and the creation of visual metaphors characterize his work.
In 1999, Omar was the subject of a complete
retrospective of films and videos at the
Museum of Modern Art in
New York City. In 2001, additional retrospectives took place in
Rio de Janeiro and
São Paulo at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil.
In the 1997 edition of the São Paulo Bienal, Omar presented the photographic installation
Anthropology of the Glorious Face, a panel consisting of 99 large-format black-and-white photographs. The series was part of a study on faces and photographic ecstasy as a transcendental dimension. It is considered a classic moment of Brazilian photography . Some of these images are the origin of the current color series
The Mechanical Skin.
In 2001, Omar received awards given by the Associação Paulista de Críticos de Arte for two exhibitions: The Splendor of Opposites, a series of landscape photographs of the
Amazon in which he reinvents space and light, working with 3D effects and
Fractions of Light, a series of lightboxes exploring the serial quality and "internal" luminosity of images from different supports.
Omar was also spotlighted in the Bienal de São Paulo 2002 with the series
Journey to Afghanistan, a selection of 30 large-size photographs composing paradoxical landscapes and impossible perspectives in which the images, captured in the catastrophe zone between Kabul and Banyan, deconstruct the journalistic gaze and point to a post-contemporary
realism.
Omar's contemporary video production uses an extremely sophisticated language with the creation of visual metaphors and unexpected relations between images and sounds.
He published the photo albums
Anthropology of the Glorious Face,
Zen and the Glorious Art of Photography, and
The Splendor of Opposites.
The Logic of Ecstasy is the reference book for his work in film and video.
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Arthur Omar's website
