After the military dictatorship implemented its most repressive decree, known as AI-5 (Institutional Act Number Five), the suppression of civil liberties and state violence intensified. In this context, many artists began to reconsider not only the themes of their works, but also the logic of the art system. While the New Figuration resorted to popular culture and most of all, a figurative language to discuss Brazilian reality, experimental and conceptual artists rejected traditional representation and sought new forms of production, circulation and reception for their work.
With conceptual art, the emphasis shifted from the object to the concept that sustains it. Although conceptual art is an international movement, in Brazil it acquired its own features and reacted to the conditions imposed by the dictatorial context, adding political content. Artists developed works that went beyond the limits of museums and galleries, and occupied urban space, provoking critical interventions in everyday life. In this way, they not only questioned the definition of the art object, but the very logic of institutions as legitimising spaces for art, adding to this a reflection on the materiality of the work, its supports and modes of circulation.
These practices broadened the field of intervention and even the definition of artistic production by incorporating procedures such as the readymade, performance and photography, as well as unconventional materials and techniques. This art also deeply valued freedom in the creative process, which ended up absorbing different languages and experiences. The body became a space for artistic creation and experimentation, as in the research developed by Lygia Clark in her sensorial phase. Among the artists working with these tendencies, there are also some who maintained an underlying concrete and abstract foundation.