Willys de Castro was born in 1926 in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. He moved to São Paulo in 1941, becoming a painter towards the end of that decade. He began working with geometrical-abstract paintings in 1950 and by 1953 had become associated with the emergent Concrete art movement that arose following the impact that the Swiss artists represented at the first São Paulo Biennial in 1951 had on the local artistic circuit.

In 1958 he traveled to Europe and, upon his return to Brazil the following year, he became associated with the rebel Neo-Concrete artists from Rio de Janeiro who were rejecting what they saw as the rigidity and dogmatic character of Concretism. He participate...