CSCA Book Launch: Sergio B. Martins

You are invited to celebrate the launch of Sergio Martins’ new book: Borderless Painting as Borderless Art: Antonio Dias Between Brazil and Europe (University of California Press, 2026).

Sergio Martins will be in conversation with Teresa Kittler.

Borderless Painting as Borderless Art is the first in-depth monograph on the major Brazilian artist Antonio Dias.

Sérgio B. Martins is Associate Professor of Art History in the History Department at Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro and author of Constructing an Avant-Garde: Art in Brazil, 1949–1979.

Teresa Kittler is Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of York and her most recent publications include Pas de Deux: Sauzeau e Boetti. In Ed Teresa Kittler and Sharon Hecker Art and Intimacy in Modern Italy: Entangled Lives.

Discussion to be followed by a drinks reception.

About the Book

The artwork of Antonio Dias (1944–2018) uniquely captures the interwoven histories of Brazilian postwar realism and of European conceptualism in the 1960s and 1970s. By tracking Dias’s ever-shifting works and circulation as he moved from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, and then to Milan, Borderless Painting as Borderless Art provides the first in-depth study of the artist.

Sérgio B. Martins uses Dias’s trajectory as a lens to explore different approaches to avant-gardism and its crisis in Brazil, France, and northern Italy, weaving in the perspectives of figures such as Hélio Oiticica, Harald Szeemann, Pierre Restany, Giulio Paolini, and Tommaso Trini, as well as the Fluxus movement. The book ultimately argues that Dias pitted his formation in a semi-peripheral avant-garde against a post–avant-gardist milieu where commodity culture and market relations were far more pervasive and determinant vis-à-vis the arts scene.

“Tracking the transnational career of the Brazilian artist Antonio Dias across two continents, Sérgio Martins’s excellent study provides a welcome critique of existing histories of a seemingly borderless global conceptualism. Introducing a potent concept of semiperipherality, Martins demonstrates how the specificity of Dias’s artistic trajectory not only delineates an emerging tension between neo-avant-garde and post-avant-garde positions but also sparks a short circuit between disparate social and cultural realities within the uneven system of global capitalism. Based on meticulous research, Martins’s Borderless Painting as Borderless Art makes a major methodological intervention within current debates on the transcultural constitution of a global contemporary art.”—Eric C. H. de Bruyn, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, Freie Universität Berlin.