Moyses Baumstein

Moysés Baumstein was a Brazilian artist and inventor who was considered a pioneer of technological art in Brazil. He was born in São Paulo in 1931, and started his artistic career as a painter influenced by the Spanish painter Joan Ponç, with whom he founded the group “L´Espai” in São Paulo in 1960. He later became interested in photography, cinema and theatre, and began to write experimental fiction and produce and direct animation films in Super8 and 16mm. In 1981, he founded Videcom, a video production house in São Paulo directed for corporate and cultural audiovisual productions. It was not until 1982 that he began to work in holography, using artisanal methods. He completed and perfected his technique in 1983 after a holography workshop with the German artist Dieter Jung. In the same year, he had his first holographic exhibition at the Museu da Imagem e do Som (MIS) in São Paulo. In 1984, he developed a specific holographic technique for chromatic control and began the regular production of technically very elaborate works. At that time, in his holographic studio, he began the production of commercial holograms as well as artistic works. In some of his projects in this field, he worked in collaboration with other Brazilian artists and poets interested in holography, such as Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari, Julio Plaza and José Wagner Garcia. The results of such collaboration were shown in exhibitions in Brazil, such as the “Triluz” exhibition (1986) in the MIS, and at the “Idehologia” exhibition (1987) in the Museu de Arte Contemporânea, both in São Paulo, and also abroad in Spain and Portugal at the Calouste Gulbekian Foundation (Triluz Portugal) amongst others. With José Wagner Garcia, he created the prototype of a holographic cinema projector, a "Holographic Kinetoscope". A year after his death, a retrospective of his cinema and video works was held at the 9th International “Videobrasil” Festival - 1992 in São Paulo. Holographic poems by Augusto de Campos and produced by Baumstein were purchased by the "Centre Régional des Lettres de Basse-Normandie" in France and in 2007, the holographic poem REVER was exhibited at the exhibition "Concrete Poetry - O Projeto Verbivocovisual" in Tomie Ohtake Institute (São Paulo) and at the Palácio das Artes (Belo Horizonte). He died in Rio de Janeiro in 1991, at the age of 60, due to complications after a stroke. He left behind a legacy of curiosity, creativity and innovation that influenced generations of Brazilian and international artists.