Claudio Tozzi valuation
Brazilian Pop of the dictatorship years — comic panels, astronauts and Che, in flat hard colour.
Claudio Tozzi was born in Sao Paulo in 1944, trained as an architect, and made his name during the years of Brazil's military dictatorship with paintings that used the flat colour and panel structure of comics and advertising to carry a political charge that could not be stated openly.
What a work by Claudio Tozzi is worth
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Bio
Claudio Tozzi was born in Sao Paulo in 1944, trained as an architect, and made his name during the years of Brazil's military dictatorship with paintings that used the flat colour and panel structure of comics and advertising to carry a political charge that could not be stated openly. Multitudes, astronauts, bandits, Guevara and repeated figures in enamel and acrylic on board became his vocabulary. He was included in the Sao Paulo Biennial and has since worked extensively on large-scale public art and tiled murals for the city, including for its metro system.
A Brazilian market, with the works from the late 1960s and early 1970s leading it decisively — that period is the historically important one and the one institutions pursue. Later work is a broader and more modest field. Enamel and acrylic on board is the characteristic support and it warps, chips at the edges and shows any retouching against flat unmodulated colour, so condition matters. There is a print output in screenprint from the same period. Provenance through documented Brazilian collections and exhibitions carries weight.
FAU-USP, the Astronauts and the metro panels
Tozzi won the poster competition for the 11th Salão Paulista de Arte Moderna while still young, studied architecture at the University of São Paulo from 1963 to 1968, and on a study trip to Europe in 1969 made the Astronautas and Parafusos series of prints, objects and paintings. From 1972 the work moved from Pop towards conceptual studies of colour, pigment and light.
In the 1970s he co-founded Cinemobiles with Abrão Berman and made short films in Super 8. In the 1980s he made public panels in São Paulo, among them Zebra on a building in the Praça da República and works for the Sé and Barra Funda metro stations, and another for Maracanã station in Rio. His screenprint Guevara vivo ou morto is among his best-known works.
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