The Body Art (Body Art) determines an aspect of contemporary art that takes the body a means of expression or to support the implementation of work, often involving themselves in the event (happening) and performance. It is considered the artist's body as support for interventions associated with violence, pain and physical exertion. The blood, sweat, saliva and other body fluids mobilized in the work disrupt the materiality of the body, which is presented as support for gestures and scenes that take time for the form of rituals and sacrifices. Tattoos, repeated acts injuries, deformations escarnificações, disguises are made sometimes in private places, sometimes in public places, which often indicates the character of the theatrical art of the body.

The experiments performed by the Body Art must be understood as an aspect of contemporary art as opposed to an internationalized market is technical and related to new social actors. From the 60's especially with the advent of pop art and minimalism, the frameworks are questioned social and artistic centers of modern art, making it impossible, since then only think of art categories like paintings, although clear divide their own way, attempt to run things from the art world to nature, urban reality and the world of technology. The works articulate different languages: dance, music, art, theater, sculpture, literature, challenging the usual classifications and question the character of artistic performances and the very definition of art. The relationship between art and everyday life, the breaking of barriers between art and non art and decisive importance of the viewer as part of the work form the focal points for substantial part of contemporary lines: ambient public art, process art and conceptual art.

The Body Art affiliate themselves with a romantic subjectivity, which puts the tone in the artist: his personality and biographical acts created. It also recovers the pioneering experiments of the Surrealists and Dadaists to use the body of the artist as regards the work. Replays certain practices used by "primitive" societies such as body painting, tattoos and various inscriptions on the body.