From 1932 to 1936, Hercules Barsotti studied drawing and composition under Enrico Vio, the painter. In 1937, he graduated in Industrial Chemistry from the Mackenzie Institute, São Paulo, SP. He began painting in 1940, and in the following decade he made his first concrete paintings, as well as working as a textile designer and designing costumes for the theater.
In 1954 (with Willys de Castro), he founded Estúdio de Projetos Gráficos, producing illustrations for various magazines and developing fabric prints. He went on a study trip to Europe in 1958, meeting Max Bill, one of the main theoreticians of concrete art. He visited Italy, Switzerland, France, Portugal and Spain. Back in Brazil, he had his first solo exhibition at the Galeria de Arte das Folhas, São Paulo, SP. Invited by the poet Ferreira Gullar, he joined the Neo-concrete Group in Rio de Janeiro and took part in the group’s exhibitions held at the Ministry of Education and Culture, MEC, Rio de Janeiro, 1960, and at the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo, MAM/SP, 1961. He also took part in the Konkrete Kunst (Concrete Art) exhibition organized by Max Bill in Zurich.
From 1963 to 1965, he took part in the “New Trends” group. He held solo exhibitions at the Petite Galerie, Rio de Janeiro, in 1981, 1984, 1986, 1988 (alongside Willys de Castro) and, in 1993, at the Raquel Arnaud Art Office, São Paulo. He took part in the São Paulo International Biennial in 1959 and again in the 1961, 1963 and 1987 editions; the Inter-American Biennial in Mexico and in various international exhibitions in cities such as New York, Vienna, London and Brussels. In 2004, MAM-SP organized a retrospective of the artist. In his work, Hercules Barsotti explores color, the dynamic possibilities of form and uses unusual painting formats, such as rhombuses, hexagons, pentagons and circumferences. The arrangement of the color fields creates the illusion of three-dimensionality.
