Roberto Magalhães was born 1940 in Rio de Janeiro, and has spent over six decades building one of the most singular and autonomous bodies of work in Brazilian contemporary art. From childhood he showed an irrepressible drive to draw, contributing illustrations to the local newspaper as a boy and publishing caricatures of students and teachers in the weekly paper of Colégio São Bento, where his critical and ironic eye was already fully formed. He abandoned formal studies at twenty to dedicate himself entirely to art.His early career was shaped by pen and ink drawings of fantastic realism -- human figures, animals, cities, and objects displaced from their natural logic and reassembled in images that were at once unsettling and darkly funny. In the 1960s he emerged as one of the key voices of the Brazilian avant-garde, participating in the landmark Opinião 65 exhibition at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro alongside Antonio Dias and a generation of artists who fundamentally redirected Brazilian visual art. International recognition followed quickly: the IV International Engraving Biennial in Tokyo, Brazilian Art Today at the Royal Academy in London, and the 4th Paris Biennial, where he received the engraving prize in 1965, then the travel prize at the 15th National Salon of Modern Art two years later, which took him to Paris.In 1969, at the height of his career, he withdrew from the art world entirely to study occultism, theosophy, and Buddhism, eventually spending four years helping to build the Meditation Center of the Brazilian Buddhist Society. He returned to painting in 1975, and the work that followed bore the full weight of that interior journey: esoteric imagery, mystical figures, and a deepened strangeness that ran alongside his persistent humor and irony.His poetics is built on the distortion of the real. Characters, self-portraits, objects, and landscapes are placed out of order, stripped of their conventional logic, and reassembled in a space where fiction and reality are indistinguishable from one another. The face recurs obsessively -- as a site of dysfunction, masquerade, and self-examination. Curator Felipe Scovino has written that Magalhães constructed an autonomous place in Brazilian art, resistant to spectacularization and trend, and that the smile recurring throughout his work is perpetually on the verge of becoming a sneer, most often directed at himself.In 1992 the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Rio de Janeiro organized a thirty-year retrospective of his work, the largest dedicated to his practice at that time. In 2000, beginning a new phase he called the Atypicals, he turned to abstraction for the first time. Subsequent exhibitions have included major shows at the Tomie Ohtake Institute in São Paulo, the Imperial Palace in Rio de Janeiro, and institutions in Beijing and across Europe and Latin America. He lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.