Iole de Freitas is a sculptor, engraver, and multimedia artist. She studied Design at the Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial (Esdi) in Rio de Janeiro, from 1964 to 1965. In 1970, she moved to Milan where she worked as a designer at Olivetti’s Corporate Image Studio, under the guidance of architect Hans von Klier. From 1973, when her first experimental films, Light Work and Elements, were shown at the Galleria Diagramma in Milan, she began developing experimental photography and super-8 artworks in which the representation of the body emerges as the main theme.
In the early 1980s, Iole de Freitas shifted her focus to the three-dimensional field, creating the Aramões, compact structures made of wires, tubes, saws and fabrics. In 1986, she received a Fulbright-Capes Fellowship for research at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. From 1987 to 1989, she directed the Instituto Nacional de Artes Plásticas da Funarte (National Visual Arts Institute of the Brazilian Arts Foundation), in Rio de Janeiro.
In 1991, she received the Vitae Fellowship in Visual Arts. Iole de Freitas teaches sculpture at Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage (EAV/Parque Lage) in Rio de Janeiro. In the 1990s, she begins to create large sculptures. The sculptures developed between 1995 and 1997 are more fluid, made with semitransparent materials.
From 2000 on, her work seeks a relationship of tension and power with the architecture of the museums and cultural centers where they are shown. Sometimes her works physically break through the walls of museums, projecting themselves outwards, onto the buildings’ facades, thus questioning the territorialization of art.