Rubem Valentim and the poetics of an Afro-Brazilian modernity at MAM Rio.
14 April 2026
‘Rubem Valentim: a ordem do sensível’ unfolds as both retrospective and reorientation, tracing the contours of an artistic language forged between abstraction and ancestral memory. Bringing together around 180 works across painting, relief and sculpture, the exhibition surveys over four decades of practice, positioning Valentim as a singular architect of form within 20th-century Brazilian art.
Valentim’s compositions do not simply inhabit geometry. They activate it. Through a visual vocabulary rooted in Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous cosmologies, his emblematic structures transform line, colour and symbol into carriers of spiritual and cultural resonance. His practice insists on a “sensitive order”, one that resists the neutrality often ascribed to modernist abstraction, instead grounding it in lived histories and ritual knowledge.
Curated by Raquel Barreto and Phelipe Rezende, the exhibition foregrounds the breadth and coherence of this project, culminating in works such as Templo de Oxalá, where symbolic systems converge in a spatial register that is almost liturgical.
In revisiting Valentim today, MAM Rio proposes not only a retrospective, but a recalibration: an invitation to read abstraction as a site of cultural continuity, where geometry becomes a language of resistance, memory and renewal.
This exhibition is on view at MAM Rio from 18 April 2026 onwards.
