Inventing with Hélio Oiticica: The Story of a Friendship by Andreas Valentin

The publication traces Andreas Valentin’s lifelong relationship with Brazilian avant-garde artist Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980). Spanning decades and continents, it began in 1959, when Valentin was six years old and began taking art lessons with Oiticica. It continued through exchanges of letters when, in the mid-1960s, Valentin moved to Thailand and Oiticica moved to the UK in 1968. As Irene V. Small writes in her preface to the book, their relationship was “reignited and transformed when they both resided in the United States in the 1970s: Valentin, now a university student studying in Pennsylvania, while Oiticica, ever-more transgressive, built a cosmos of experimental practice with a growing cast of characters in his loft in New York City”.

In 1978, Oiticica returned to Rio, and their “camaraderie” continued. Andreas Valentin was one of two very close friends who had keys to his apartment when Hélio Oiticica suffered a fatal stroke at the age of forty-two.