THE CROSSOVER BETWEEN ART AND LIFE has been a defining feature of much of the art from Rio de Janeiro that has gained international attention in the last few years. The Neo-concrete art of Lydia Clark and Hélio Oiticica in the '50s and '60s explored encounters between geometric abstraction on the one hand and the body and daily life on the other. Since then, artists here (among them Artur Barrio, Cildo Meireles, and Tunga) have connected art and reality, thematically and conceptually, in different ways—through politics, the everyday, and the body.

Ernesto Neto's work is very much part of