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Lothar Charoux
Lothar Charoux (February 5, 1912- February 23, 1987) was an Austro-Brazilian painter, draftsman, and teacher who helped shape the pathway of the concrete art movement. As the country of Brazil was experiencing major political shifts due to the Brazilian Revolution of 1930, artists such as Charoux took advantage of the time of political turmoil to experiment with his art. He contributed greatly to the concrete art movement with his abstract-geometric composed art pieces.

Biography and Training and Influences
Lothar Charoux was born February 5, 1912, in Vienna, Austria. He died in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on February 23, 1987. In 1928, Charoux moved to São Paulo with his family where he was raised for the rest of his childhood. Charoux comes from a family of artists. At a young age, he began studying under his uncle, Siegfried Charoux, who was a figurative sculptor throughout his career. In the 1930s, he enrolled at the Liceu de Artes e Ofícios (School of Arts and Crafts) in São Paulo, where he met and began studying painting under Waldemar Cordeiro. In 1952, Lothar Charoux participated and founded the Grupo Ruptura, along with Waldemar Cordeiro, Anatol Wladyslaw, Geraldo de Barros, Leopoldo Haar, and many other artists that would later join the group. Artists who belonged to Grupo Ruptura collectively influenced one another, as they all sought to introduce modern art into Brazilian culture with artwork that was non-representational and used abstract geometric composition.

Style of Art and Description of Artwork/ Ideas
Charoux’s earlier art pieces consisted of portraits and landscape paintings, but he would later focus on cubist-expressionist and abstract geometric artwork. This major shift in Charoux’s art style was due to his involvement in introducing modern art to Brazil. The art pieces that he began creating were mainly those of concrete and abstract art, which are styles of nonrepresentational art. While abstract art, in the broadest sense of the word, uses shapes and forms borrowed from the real world in order to take its point across, concrete art dispenses with references to the physical world altogether, instead focusing solely on ideas that emanate "directly from the mind". Charoux used a variety of mediums to create his abstract and concrete-styled artworks such as oil on canvas, ink on paper, and gouache on board mounted on a wood panel. The variation in Charoux’s media usage allowed him to create his non-representational style artworks. In some of Charoux's art pieces, the background was superimposed on lines, those in sharp colors, contrast with the other plane and gave an impression of stability until they were diverted, breaking the balance of the work. Other times those lines resembled strings of a musical instrument and seemed to vibrate by contrasting with the background color. In the 1950s, Charoux created a series of black drawings, in which he explored the graphic opposition of the white line to a black surface, promoting its luminous value. In other works, he seeks to provide a tension between figure and background, through hollow geometric shapes that cut the plane in different directions. He uses bold colors with relatively neutral-colored backgrounds to create a dramatic contrast between the main subject in the foreground and the background.

Grupo Ruptura
Many of these ideas were promoted by Grupo Ruptura, a group of artists with which Charoux was connected. The additional founding members of Grupo Ruptura included artists Waldemar Cordeiro, Anatol Wladyslaw, Geraldo de Barros, Leopoldo Haar, and many others. The group sought to advance modern art in Brazil in the 1950s. Grupo Ruptura's works are often characterized by strong geometric shapes and bold colors. The Ruptura artists produced artworks that rejected realistic and traditional subject matters, such as the human form. Instead, artists utilized and purposefully integrated mathematical formulas and drew upon scientific theories in order to create the precise non-representational products typically unattainable by the human eye or hand alone. The purpose of their methods was to break away from naturalistic painting. In 1952 an exhibition called Ruptura was held at the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art. This exhibition marked the beginning of the concrete art movement in Brazil.

Accomplishments
Aside from the achievements with Grupo Ruptura, Lothar Charoux also had many accomplishments of his own throughout his individual career as an artist. In 1947, Charoux held his first solo exhibition at Galeria Itapetininga. From 1948 onwards, Charoux turned to constructive questions ). In 1974, Lothar Charoux was honored with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo (MAM/SP) and at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro (MAM/RJ) . After some time in his art career, Charoux became a professor at the Liceu de Artes e Ofícios in São Paulo . Many of his art pieces still remain at the Museum of Contemporary Art at USP, São Paulo, SP.

List of Exhibitions
-1947, Itapetininga Gallery

-2019, “The Visit of Max Bill- Concrete Art in Brazil”, Galerie Kogan Amaro I Zurich, August 29- October 25, 2019

-2019- 2020, “Sur Moderno: Journeys of Abstraction- The Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift”, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), October 21, 2019- September 12, 2020

-2020, ”Diálogo Concreto: Virtualidades Ópticas”, Galeria Berenice Arvani, October 20- November 27, 2020

-2021, "Conversas Na Ponte Aérea- Diálogos Artísticos entre São Paulo e Rio de Janeiro- Anos 50, 60, e 70”, Galeria Berenice Arvani, June 8- July 20, 2021

List of Artworks
-CIRCULOS (CIRCLES)

-LINHAS SOBRE VERDE E PRETO (LINES ON GREEN AND BLACK), OIL ON CANVAS

-COMPOSIÇAO- ELEMENTOS PERPENDICULARES (COMPOSITION- PERPENDICULAR ELEMENTS), INK ON PAPER, 1956

-SEM TÍTULO (UNTITLED), 1956

-EQUILIBRIO RESTABLECIDO (BALANCE RESET), CONCRETE, 1960

-HORIZONTAIS (HORIZONTAL), CONCRETE, 1960

-UNTITLED, CONCRETE, 1970

-UNTITLED,1970

-QUADRADO (SQUARE), GOUACHE ON BOARD MOUNTED ON WOOD PANEL, 1971

-QUADRADOS (SQUARES), GOUACHE ON PAPER MOUNTED ON WOOD PANEL, 1973 22