Antonio Obá

Antonio Oba was born in 1983 in Brasilia (Brazil) where he still lives and works. Since his winning of the Brazilian PIPA price in 2017, he has been enjoying international recognition which his integration into the Pinault Collection has only been heightening. 

Antonio Oba’s polymorphic and syncretic practice —between painting, drawing, sculpture, performance and installation work— is imbued with the Brazilian mystic universe in which he was raised. Combining types of ex-votos with organic elements with strong symbolic meanings, such as horse teethes, horseshoes, nails, the artist adds to the images an intimate reflection on the place of the body in rites and social space but also on his own mixed, black, sometimes eroticized, body. Thus, Antonio Oba mixes various artistic vocabularies which he inserts into ambitious painted compositions in order to ward off any possible ethnic prejudices. Those composite pictures, similar to magically reinvested religious icons, seem to bear witness to painful stories and broken bodies, to both a collective and emotional memory, to personal narratives as well as a universal past.

Courtesy of Éditions Dilecta