While most artists from the 1980s Generation dedicated themselves to painting, others turned their attention to experimenting with new languages and incorporating unusual elements displaced from their original meanings and functions. Though they did not form an homogeneous and organised movement, they shared an investigative attitude that resulted in sculptures, installations and hybrid works.
Many artists drew on strategies related to Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, but in the Brazilian context the procedure was carried out through the appropriation of industrial residues, items found on the streets or in popular markets, household utensils, textile scraps, toys, technological devices and other artifacts from material culture. These were remixed or presented on unexpected scales to produce new effects in the works and offer a more immediate connection with reality.
While the 1970s conceptual generation employed non-artistic objects to question the definition of art itself, this new generation was interested in the aesthetics of hybridisation, in which materials from multiple origins were joined in a non-hierarchical way. This operation was carried out with humour, irony and irreverence, in some cases referencing kitsch. Not to formulate a direct critique against consumerism or the system, but to produce new meanings and to question forms of representation in visual culture.
These practices started in the 1980s and were developed in the following decades, and they contributed to an expansion of the repertoire of Brazilian contemporary art by legitimising the use of elements and processes that affirm the freedom of creative processes.