Tiago Carneiro da Cunha

Who is Tiago Carneiro da Cunha?

Tiago Carneiro da Cunha, is a Brazilian artist.

He is the son of José Mariano Carneiro da Cunha and Manuela Ligeti Carneiro da Cunha, anthropologists. During his formative years, he took life-drawing classes in the studio of local painter Sergio Sister, drew comics, which were published, when he was 17, in the Brazilian underground comics mag Animal, and worked as a freelance illustrator for Folha de São Paulo newspaper and DPZ advertising agency.

In his early twenties, after a year studying visual arts at Parsons School, New York, he worked as an assistant to theatre director and visual artist Robert Wilson in several stage productions in Europe and the US. He moved to Barcelona in 1995, where he continued his studies and helped create the XXX collective, with which he presented performances in museums and festivals in Spain and Portugal, and which received the KRTU prize from the Government of Catalunya in 1996.

On his return to Brazil in 1998, he was awarded the Apartes Scholarship, from the Brazilian Ministry of Education's CAPES Institute, for postgraduate studies in Visual Arts at Goldsmiths College London, where he is tutored by artists such as the Chapman Brothers, Liam Gillick, Martin Maloney, Cerith Wyn Evans, Pierre Bismuth, Richard Wentworth and Michael Craig-Martin among others. In collaboration with Eva Bensasson, he organizes the collective exhibition "nonstop opening", which shows hundreds of young artists in the Acava Studios Gallery in Soho, and which later receives an edition in Lisbon at the Galeria Zé dos Bois. Also during his stay in London, he works for a year as an assistant to British artist Liam Gillick.