Main Focus
- Art Criticism in Brazilian Modernism
- Literature and Visual Arts
- Antropofagia Movement
- Transnational Avant-garde History
Research Project
The World’s Bones: South American Meditations on Art History and Avant-garde by Flávio de Carvalho
Curriculum Vitae
Thiago Gil Virava is a Postdoctoral fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max
Planck Institut für Kunstgeschichte. His academic career has been focused
mainly on the history of Modern Art and Art Criticism in Brazil during the
first half of the 20th Century. He has been working on topics such as the
reception of the surrealist movement in Brazil, the writings on art by Oswald
de Andrade, the Monumento às Bandeiras at the Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo, and
the history of the São Paulo Biennales. Currently, he is investigating the
travel book Os ossos do mundo (1936), by Brazilian artist Flávio de
Carvalho, with a focus on the artist’s meditations on Italian Renaissance art
and the transnational network of collaborators formed by De Carvalho during his
journey. He holds a master's and Ph.D. in visual arts from the School of
Communications and Arts at the University of São Paulo (2012 and 2018). Between
2013 and 2024, he worked as a researcher and manager of the education
department at the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo. He is the author of the books Uma
Brecha para o Surrealismo: percepções do movimento surrealista no Brasil
(Alameda, 2015) and Um boxeur na arena: Oswald de Andrade e as artes visuais
no Brasil (Edições Sesc/Biblioteca Brasiliana Guita e José Mindlin, 2024).
He has written articles and book chapters on Brazilian Modernism for academic
and non-academic works published in Brazil and abroad. Since 2023, he has been
a Postdoctoral researcher in the Literature Sciences Program at the Federal University
of Rio de Janeiro, with an investigation into Flávio de Carvalho’s relationship
with Czechoslovak artists and writers.