Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of São Paulo

This guide at the Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of São Paulo follows painter Rubem Valentim, who grew up beside candomblé altars in a Salvador terreiro before training as a dentist and turning seriously to painting in his late twenties. It traces how, from the mid-1950s, he began stripping the sacred symbols of his childhood, an orixá's arrow, an axe, a fan of leaves, down to flat colour and geometry. Twelve of his panels live in this collection, donated with the museum's founding trove in 1963.