ARTHUR OMAR (born 1948) Brazilian contemporary artist -video artist, photographer, filmmaker, installation artist

It has been said that “nothing can stop the flow of images, words, sounds and ideas” found in the work of Arthur Omar. This torrential flow and velocity are also his personal marks. Arthur Omar is a multiple Brazilian artist, with a remarkable presence in many areas of artistic production.

He works with cinema, video, photographic installations, music, poetry and drawing, and also writes essays and theoretical reflections on the process of creation and the nature of images. In every field, Arthur Omar has introduced new ways of thinking and radical contributions to the renewal of languages and techniques.

Themes such as aesthetic ecstasy, sensory and social violence, and the creation of visual metaphors characterize his work, always in search of a new iconography of Brazilian reality. In experimental documentaries, photographs, video-art, fashion, fiction features and video installations, his images migrate and get transformed through different media, supports and languages.

In 1999, he was the subject of a complete retrospective of films and videos at MoMA, in New York. In 2001, the same happened in Rio de Janeiro and S o Paulo, at Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil.

In the 1997 edition of the S o Paulo Bienal, he presented the photographic installation Anthropology of the Glorious Face, a panel consisting of 99 large-format black-and-white photographs, part of a study on faces and photographic ecstasy as a transcendental dimension, a series recognized today as a classic moment of Brazilian photography. Some of these images are the origin of the current color series The Mechanical Skin.

He was also a highlight of the Bienal de S o 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.

In 2001 he received awards given by the Associa o Paulista de Cr ticos de Arte for two exhibitions: The Splendor of Opposites, at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil-SP, a series of landscape photographs of the Amazon in which he reinvents space and light, working with 3D effects; and Fractions of Light, at the Galeria Nara Roesler, a series of light boxes exploring the serial quality and “internal” luminosity of images from different supports.

His contemporary video production uses an extremely sophisticated language, with the creation of visual metaphors and unexpected relations between images and sounds (the shorts Acts of Diamond, Subtle Panic, The Logic of Ecstasy and the feature-length video Dreams and Ghost Stories, with developments into the field of video installations, for which he developed his own language, full of sensory impact and characterized by the immersion of the viewer (Inferno, Fluxus).

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. He participated in art exhibitions in Brazil and abroad: Bienal de Val ncia Biennal 2000, Bienal do Mercosul 1999, Bienal de Havana 2000, Museum of Contemporary Art in Korea, 2002, ARCO 2000 and 2003, and LisboaPhoto 2003, using he huge space of the Portugal Pavilion for a big retrospective of his black and white faces.

External link

• Arthur Omar's website (http://www.arthuromar.com/)