Desert

Antonio Manuel Lima Dias (February 22, 1944-August 1, 2018), known as Antonio Dias, was a Brazilian artist and graphic designer.

He was born in 1944 in Campina Grande, in the state of Paraiba in Brazil. Dias and his family moved to Rio Janeiro in 1957, where he attended the Academy of Fine Arts and then began working as a graphic designer. During the 1960s, Dias became a regular at artist Oswaldo Goeldi's studio at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes.

In 1965 he won a scholarship and moved to Paris for two years. From 1968 he was in Milan where he formed strong bonds of friendship with artists such as Mario Schifano, Luciano Fabro, Alighieri Boetti and Giulio Paolini. He also begins to experiment with different languages, making, for example, super 8 films such as The Illustration of Art I in 1971, in which two bandages crossed the skin of a model, combining geometry, abstraction and body art.

He would make new journeys that took him to Germany, where he resided in Cologne and Berlin, to the United States of America, and to Nepal, where he got to make a special handmade paper that would allow him to carry out various experiments with colors.

Although Dias has always rejected association with the American pop art movement, critics and curators have often drawn comparisons between his work and the movement. In 2015 he was included in Tate Modern's The World Goes Pop and told the New York Times, "I always protest when I'm accused of being Pop, it's not my party," and again, "My art had nothing Pop about it. Art is a field of action that divides your thoughts and forces you to take a position. In my case it was always an attempt at self-affirmation. Art in the 1960s for me was like participating in guerrilla warfare."

Also during these years his fame increased significantly and many important museums acquired his works: among them MOMA in New York, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, the Tate Gallery in London, the Daros Collection in Zurich, and many foundations in Latin America.  Antonio Dias died in 2018 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.