In the first major exhibition in Los Angeles dedicated to the art of Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980), Lisson Gallery presents a selection of the artist’s seminal compositions, including vibrant gouaches, and dynamic suspended sculptures, and a rare oil painting. Highlighting the formative years of Oiticica’s career, the exhibition charts his trajectory from early geometric abstraction to immersive environments that transformed the viewer’s experience with art and space. While living in Washington, D.C., from 1947 to 1949, Oiticica was first introduced to the art and theories of Paul Klee, Kazimir Malevich, and Piet Mondrian at the National Gallery of Art. At sixteen, he began studying under artist Ivan Serpa at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro and soon joined the Grupo Frente (1954–56), a collective of innovative artists led by Serpa. Oiticica’s earliest works—gouache on cardboard—reflect both his fascination with European modernism and his engagement with Grupo Frente. United in their rejection of academic and figurative Brazilian modernism, the Grupo Frente embraced experimentation and explored diverse abstract and constructivist visual languages. Their approaches emphasized color, structure, and technical innovation—sometimes diverging sharply from one another. Among the works in the exhibition is a rare Grupo Frente-period gouache on masonite painting by Oiticica, exemplifying the visual strategies and material processes that defined the collective. Throughout 1957-58, Oiticica continued to analyze the roles of color, structure and space in the production of his iconic series of Metaesquemas (a title that translates roughly as ‘metaschemes’ or ‘metastructures’). These comprise multiple variations upon a basic structure – usually rectangular or rhomboid shapes arrayed in a tentative grid over a single underlying color. Only six Metaesquemas were made in oil on canvas, and of these, only four survive. Metaesquema (1958) is a single vertical instance, consisting of two columns of rectangles arrayed in brick-like tiers against a grey-blue background. The individual shapes tilt in defiance of the grid, as though the ordering logic of the composition was beginning to unravel. The semblance, in this painting, of a real-life edifice – its spatial depth tentatively implied by the vertical centreline – anticipates Oiticica’s shift into three-dimensional structures. This variation in his work culminated in the creation of the Spatial Reliefs, suspended structures conceived as “paintings in space” that activate volume, color, and the viewer’s movement. Made from cut and painted wooden planes, these works extend the logic of painting into three dimensions, creating new spatial-temporal relationships between artwork and observer. By the early 1960s, Oiticica was redefining the very purpose of art. His immersion in the everyday life of Rio’s Mangueira favela led him to develop “environmental art”—works that embraced participation, embodiment, and social experience. Whether in the Grupo Frente gouaches, the Metaesquemas or the intricate volumetric structures of the Spatial Reliefs, his work of the 1950s and ’60s harbors a generative tension – that of constituent elements poised between coherence and dispersal: between autonomous art object and inchoate world. In this regard, the works precede the radical deconstructive impulse of his multi-sensory architectural environments of the 1970s. While this exhibition marks Oiticica’s first solo presentation in Los Angeles, his art has received significant institutional recognition in the region. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) holds in its collection two Metaesquemas from the late 1950s, as well as a Penetrable from 1979. In 2010, Oiticica’s iconic blue-lit swimming pool installation from 1973, a collaboration with Neville D’Almeida, was featured in Suprasensorial at the Museum of Contemporary Art. His influence continues to expand: this December, Dia Beacon will restage Oiticica’s monumental installation Grande Núcleo (Grand Nucleus), NC3, NC4, NC6 (1960–63), alongside a selection of other major works.