Ernesto Neto

Ernesto Neto was born in 1964 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he lives and works. He studied at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage and the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro. Since the late 1980s, he has developed a sculptural practice centred on bodily experience, participation and the relationship between art and its surrounding environment. Neto creates sculptures and immersive environments using unconventional materials and techniques, including elastic and translucent fabrics, cushions, crochet, aromatic spices and musical instruments. His works engage the viewer’s entire body, transforming visitors from observers into active participants in the experience of the artwork. They invite physical interaction through touch, movement, scent and sound, challenging the traditional emphasis on vision alone. Neto is best known for his large-scale installations, often composed of biomorphic, suspended forms that generate spaces of playful and sensory encounter. His practice draws on the legacy of the Brazilian Neo-Concrete movement—particularly its emphasis on participation, embodiment and the integration of art into lived experience—as well as on other experimental artistic practices of the 1960s and 1970s. Although his works are generally constructed from abstract and apparently simple forms, Neto carefully selects and arranges his materials to reveal their physical qualities and establish delicate relationships with the surrounding architecture. Over the past decade, Neto’s practice has been profoundly shaped by sustained dialogue and collaboration with the Huni Kuin, an Indigenous people from the Brazilian Amazon. These exchanges have introduced Huni Kuin knowledge, cosmologies, healing practices, songs, dances and visual motifs into collaborative installations and public programmes. Projects such as Aru Kuxipa | Sacred Secret were developed through collective processes involving Huni Kuin artists, spiritual leaders, teachers and artisans, creating spaces for encounter, ceremony and the transmission of knowledge. As in his earlier sculptures, these environments are intensely tactile and visual while also engaging smell, hearing and bodily movement. Viewers may enter, inhabit or move through them, heightening their awareness of the relationship between the body, the surrounding space and other people. Neto’s work thus approaches sculpture not as an autonomous object but as a living, social and sensory environment.