The TRIO Bienal — the Rio Art Biennial — was launched in 2015 on the occasion of the 450th anniversary of Rio de Janeiro, under the curatorship of Marcus de Lontra Costa and the direction of Alexandre Murucci, as the only biennial in the world specifically organised around the three-dimensional — sculpture, installation, object, and the expanded fields by which the three-dimensional now operates across painting, photography, performance and video. The constituting argument the programme makes is that Rio is the historical centre of Brazilian three-dimensional research — the city of Neoconcretism, of Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, of Sergio Camargo and Lygia Pape — and that a biennial framed around the three-dimensional is therefore the institution Rio's contemporary art scene has been owed.
The Bienal Tridimensional Internacional do Rio de Janeiro — known by its short title TRIO Bienal, and listed on the Biennale.com directory as the Rio Art Biennial — was conceived as a contribution to the 450th-anniversary celebrations of Rio de Janeiro in 2015 and inaugurated the same year under the general curatorship of Marcus de Lontra Costa, with Alexandre Murucci as institutional director. The constituting framing argument is unusual among the world's biennials: where the conventional contemporary biennial collects work across all media without thematic restriction, TRIO is organised specifically around the three-dimensional — sculpture, installation, object — and around what its founding catalogue calls the expanded fields of three-dimensional research, including painting, photography, performance and video read as three-dimensional propositions.
The founding edition, titled Quem foi que disse que não existe amanhã? (Who said tomorrow doesn't exist?) — a line from a song by the Rio rapper Marcelo D2 — opened on 5 September 2015 and ran through 26 November of that year, presenting work by 160 artists from 44 countries across nine venues in the city. The institutional argument the edition's title made was a deliberate rebuke of crisis discourse: a city in the middle of the post-Olympic preparation cycle and a country entering its sharpest political crisis of the post-redemocratisation period found, in the biennial's framing, an art-utopian counter-position. The audience figure recorded across the two months — 215,000 visitors, including 30,000 children from the city's public school system — confirmed the programme as a substantial popular event in its founding year.
An institution anchored in Neoconcrete inheritance
The Biennial Foundation profile of the institution sets out the framing argument: Rio de Janeiro, the profile records, "has always been the central point of the Brazilian three-dimensional research" — a claim made on the institutional weight of the Neoconcrete generation (Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Amilcar de Castro, Franz Weissmann, Sergio Camargo, Abraham Palatnik), of the Tropicalist and Neo-figurative sculptural turn (Tunga, Antonio Dias, Cildo Meireles, Waltércio Caldas), and of the continuing Rio sculptural generation (Iole de Freitas, Ascânio MMM, Ernesto Neto, José Damasceno, Ângelo Venosa, José Resende, José Bechara, Nelson Felix). The Rio biennial's working thesis is that the three-dimensional is the medium through which Rio's contribution to twentieth-century art is most legibly read, and that the contemporary biennial Rio owes itself is therefore the biennial of the three-dimensional.
The second edition opened on 17 December 2017 at the Cidade das Artes in Barra da Tijuca — the cultural centre designed by the French architect Christian de Portzamparc — and on 22 December at the Jardim Botânico do Rio, marking the first contemporary art exhibition staged in the botanical garden's bicentenary-plus history and opening the year of its 210th-anniversary celebrations. Curated by Alexandre Murucci under the title Vestir o Mundo (Dress the World), the edition brought together about fifty Brazilian and international artists organised across three modules taken from the elements: Ar (Air), representing culture, knowledge, history; Água (Water), the atavistic forces of nature and the commitment to the future; and Terra (Earth), the telluric force governing the present. The edition's argument — that "dressing the world means dressing commitments, longings, the essential elements of our existence" — was made against the backdrop of what the curator called "a moment of systemic crisis" of the humanist and democratic bases of expression and individual rights.
The institutional record of the programme since the second edition has been less continuous: no third edition has opened on a regular two-year cycle, and the institution has not produced a fully comparable third large-format programme through the early 2020s. The Rio biennial circuit since 2023 has, however, been crowded by a second contemporary institution — the NOVA Bienal Rio de Arte e Tecnologia, founded that year at the Museu do Amanhã and Praça Mauá under curators Ricardo Barreto and Paula Perissinotto of the FILE festival — so that the Rio Art Biennial position is now distributed across two institutional poles: TRIO, the older three-dimensional programme on the Lontra–Murucci axis, and NOVA, the newer art-and-technology biennial at Praça Mauá. The TRIO–NOVA pair, together with the international art fair ArtRio at Marina da Glória (founded 2011, an annual fair rather than a biennial), constitute the city's contemporary biennial-scale infrastructure.
