Danilo di Prete exhibited Paisagem Cósmica, No. 2 at the Seventh Bienal de São Paulo, after which Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho donated the piece to the OAS. The painting investigates cosmic themes through a gestural abstract language and a contrasting palette of black, white, and ochre suggestive of interstellar spaces and the light and heat of celestial events. He alternately slathered and scraped paint to create an otherworldly topography at once dense and spacious. Di Prete added sand and grit to the paint to create texture, as well as the suggestion of matter suspended in the seemingly infinite void. The tactility of Paisagem Cósmica, No. 2 recalls not only Antoni Tàpies but also the works of Alberto Burri and Lucio Fontana, two of the primary proponents of Italian informale, who helped to redefine painting in the 1950s through experimentation with materials. Informale’s interest in gesture and the fluidity of paint is apparent in Paisagem Cósmica, No. 2, although Di Prete would take a greater interest in materiality and non-traditional media in later works. The title, however, infers that di Prete envisioned paint and sand not merely as materials but as vehicles for mental and spiritual exploration of the extraterrestrial. Cosmic themes had been central to the spiritual investigations of Wassily Kandinsky and other modernists since the early 1910s and Paisagem Cósmica, No. 2 unites the longstanding modernist interest in spiritual transcendence with the realities of space exploration in the early 1960s. Though largely self-taught, Danilo di Prete was an influential member of the young Brazilian avant-garde in the 1960s. Born in Pisa, he began exhibiting in Italy in the early 1930s and, during World War II, he was part of the Artisti Italiani in Armi, a cultural exchange with Germany that sent him to Berlin and Düsseldorf. Following the war, he settled in São Paulo and between 1946 and 1950 he worked principally as a designer and enjoyed national acclaim for his posters, exhibiting in the Salão Nacional de Arte Moderna and the Salão Paulista de Arte Moderna among other venues. In 1949 he met the industrialist and patron of the arts Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho and the two reportedly conceived of the Bienal de São Paulo, though no evidence exists to support Di Prete’s involvement. However, the artist would become a major force in the Bienal de São Paulo, winning the first prize in painting at the inaugural biennial in 1951 for his naïve still life Limões (Coleção Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo). In the late 1950s Di Prete began a series of cosmic themes in a non-representational style similar in some respects to the Informalismo of Antoni Tàpies. Awards at numerous biennials followed and he was granted a special room at the Sixth in 1961, the Ninth in 1967, and the 10th in 1969. José Gómez Sicre and Sir Herbert Read also took notice of di Prete’s latest work and included him in the 1962 exhibition New Directions of Art from South America: Paintings from Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and Uruguay, drawn from the first Bienal Americana de Arte in Córdoba, Argentina. Di Prete continued to exhibit widely in the last two decades of his career and died of cardiac arrest in 1985.