Working primarily in Brazil in the mid-twentieth century, the Neo Concrete artists called for more emotion and poetry in what they perceived as the overly stilted and naive Concrete Art. Concrete Art originally emerged in the early twentieth century through the work of Swiss artist Max Bill, Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg, and others. They wanted to create works liberated from reference to the natural world, based on geometry and mathematical forms. In the 1950s, a series of art exhibitions in Brazil led Concrete Art to gain popularity and exert influence South America. The Neo Concrete movement formed in response, and comprised Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, Am’lcar de Castro, Franz Weissmann, and others. In their manifesto, published in a Brazilian newspaper in 1959, they denounced the rationalist turn in abstract art, and instead argued that art should be expressive of new, modern human realities.

Many Neo Concrete artists strove to involve their audience, encouraging interaction so that each viewer could have a personal interpretation of the work. Interested in the way people perceive color, Hélio Oiticica crafted wooden boxes that could be handled by viewers to reveal shifts in tone. Lygia Clark’s Bichos series consisted of geometric sculptures that viewers were invited to touch and reorder. Clark in particular was interested in the way that viewers complete a work of art. Neo Concrete art would have a great influence on the development of participatory art in the years to follow, particularly on the work of young South American artists like Daniel Steegmann Mangrané and Ernesto Neto.