On Tuesday, May 20 at 8pm, Brazilian artist Matheus Rocha Pitta joins Irene Small in conversation about her recent book with Zone, The Organic Line: Toward a Topology of Modernism, at b_books. Click here for more information about the event.

Irene V. Small is an art historian, critic, and professor of contemporary art and criticism at Princeton University. She has written on topics ranging from Neoconconcretism and legacies of avant-garde abstraction to radical pedagogy, social sculpture, free speech and the afterlives of slavery. In addition to The Organic Line: Toward a Topology of Modernism (Zone Books, 2024), she is the author of Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

Matheus Rocha Pitta is a Brazilian-born, Berlin-based artist who has spent much time over the past years investigating forms and perceptions of gestures at the intersection of everyday life and art. Through photography, video, food, and sculpture, his practice utilizes gesture to explore language, possession and motion with far-reaching ethical implications. His work has been shown widely in Brazil and internationally, including at the São Paulo, Taipei and Cuenca Biennials; Castello di Rivoli, Torino; Fondazione Morra-Greco, Naples; and Kunstverein in Hamburg. This summer he will show his performative sculpture “First Stone” alongside Lygia Clark’s retrospective at the Neue Nationalgalerie.