Billion Dollar Duck

Mauro Oliveira was born in São Paulo, Brazil and raised on the outskirts under extreme poverty, with no running water or electricity. He and his six siblings were sent to a military state-run orphanage after both parents passed away in their 30s. His passion for the United States and art started at age nine in the orphanage. His first art project, at age 10, was to paint and decorate the plain tin piggy banks that were given out for free by the banks and then selling them. Oliveira encouraged and supervised the other children to do the same and raised funds for food. He did stay out of trouble, studied hard and surmounted every obstacle on his way, dreaming of making it to America one day. He made it to college with straight A’s and won a student exchange program contest sponsored by the Federal University of Uberlândia, Brazil. He studied journalism and the arts and immigrated to the U.S. in 1990.

Oliveira has worked in several different art media, from oil pastels and charcoal sketches to clay sculptures. His greatest influences are Pablo Picasso and the Spanish artist Joan Miró. Oliveira's artworks have been exhibited throughout the U.S. as well as internationally, most recently in Hong Kong, Los Angeles and New York.

Beginning in the early 20th century, abstract art became a leading style of modernism. Rather than portray the world in a way that represented reality, as had been the dominating style of Western art in the previous centuries, abstract paintings, prints and sculptures are marked by a shift to geometric forms, gestural shapes and experimentation with color to express ideas, subject matter and scenes.

Although abstract art flourished in the early 1900s, propelled by movements like Fauvism and Cubism, it was rooted in the 19th century. In the 1840s, J.M.W. Turner emphasized light and motion for atmospheric paintings in which concrete details were blurred, and Paul Cézanne challenged traditional expectations of perspective in the 1890s.

Some of the earliest abstract artists — Wassily Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint — expanded on these breakthroughs while using vivid colors and forms to channel spiritual concepts. Painter Piet Mondrian, a Dutch pioneer of the art movement, explored geometric abstraction partly owing to his belief in Theosophy, which is grounded in a search for higher spiritual truths and embraces philosophers of the Renaissance period and medieval mystics. Black Square, a daringly simple 1913 work by Russian artist Kazimir Malevich, was a watershed statement on creating art that was free “from the dead weight of the real world,” as he later wrote.

Surrealism in the 1920s, led by artists such as Salvador Dalí, Meret Oppenheim and others, saw painters creating abstract pieces in order to connect to the subconscious. When Abstract Expressionism emerged in New York during the mid-20th century, it similarly centered on the process of creation, in which Helen Frankenthaler’s expressive “soak-stain” technique, Jackson Pollock’s drips of paint, and Mark Rothko’s planes of color were a radical new type of abstraction.

Conceptual art, Pop art, Hard-Edge painting and many other movements offered fresh approaches to abstraction that continued into the 21st century, with major contemporary artists now exploring it, including Anish Kapoor, Mark Bradford, El Anatsui and Julie Mehretu.

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