Anna Bella and the 70 Years of Abstract - Abstract Art Exhibition at Quitandinha
Anna Bella Geiger, at 90 years old, is one of the most important artists working today. Since a very young age, she has been committed to experimentalism in the visual arts. She participates in emblematic moments in the history of art in Brazil as a pioneering woman in engraving, in video art, in research on relations with cultural geography, what today we would call “global art”. She was a student at Fayga Ostrower's studios and, since then, has been attentive to political issues, never separating art from her social commitments. He moved to New York in 1954, attending courses taught by art historian Hanna Levy Deinhardt at MoMA. In the 1960s, Anna Bella returns to Brazil and participates in engraving courses at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro. In 1961, he exhibited abstract engravings at the VI International Bienal Arts of São Paulo and received the 1st Engraving Prize at the XVIII Saloon of Modern Art of Bahia. His interest in abstraction generates research, together with Fernando Cocchiarale, based on testimonies from artists and art critics, published in a book by Funarte (National Foundation of Arts).
As a participant in these first chapters of Brazilian contemporary art, Anna Bella Geiger remains in uninterrupted activity, experimenting with what is most current and bold in each period of world history. Here, we hear the artist tell us about the first abstract art exhibition that took place in 1954 in the Quitandinha halls. Anna Bella Informs us: “who thought of putting together this abstract art exhibition was Décio Vieira”.
And she goes on to tell us about what this “new aesthetic” of abstraction meant, which reinforces the vanguard of the initiative. At the time, there was no space interested in abstract art, “all of Latin America was figurative”, as Anna Bella told us, and goes on to specify the detractors of abstract art in the arts and in the press. On the other hand, it was an exhibition in February, during Carnival, that attracted foreigners, even interested in purchasing the works.
In addition to the abstract works, we present the artist's precursory experiences in art films. Anna Bella makes films in which her own body, a woman's body, is present in the scenes. Something that decades later we would call a character artist of self-fables. In films, the artist denounces the bureaucracy in his work “bu-ro-cra-cia”, and she thinks about ideology as a political force. And so, today, she is mentioned in books and is part of major global exhibitions about the presence of women in the visual arts.
Anna Bella Geiger is an educator, trainer of many generations of artists, and remains attentive to the ways in which world art and culture create relationships and neighborhoods. She participates in readings of works by artists in international residencies. She maintains the eloquent vivacity of someone who witnessed the horrors of conservatism and tyranny and, even so, continued to believe in the “correntes culturais” (cultural currents), the title of one of her works, which made us come here to applaud her.
Video Thomas Mendel.
Photo Thomas Mendel, Lucas Landau.
ABSTRACT ART AT QUITANDINHA
Anna Bella Geiger, participant of the emblematic 1st National Exhibition of Abstract Art, in Brazil, held in February 1953, at the Hotel Quitandinha, leads us to possible clues of what abstract art represented at that time. On the one hand, we learned that one of the participating artists, Décio Vieira, lived in Petrópolis and negotiated for the exhibition to be held. Nobody was interested in abstract art, says the artist. Interestingly, an avant-garde and daring show, as there was a lot of resistance from Brazilian intellectuals — including icons such as Cândido Portinari, Villa-Lobos and Mário de Andrade — against the arrival of abstraction in the country.
But, what was desired around abstraction? How the abandonment of reality
could cause so much discomfort?
Two events, to a certain way, explain this possible dispute; the antecedents of the Week of 22 and the inauguration of the 1st São Paulo International Biennial of Art, in 1951. The penetration of modernist ideals guided by an interest in national and popular themes was expanding and gaining strength in groups from the north to the south of Brazil. There was a political force, especially socialist, that imagined art as a tool to aware about the beauties and ills of a Brazil of people.
As a consequence of modernist interests, being “modern” was also participate in the aesthetic-formal revolutions launched by European elites. To be bold in the use of colors and shapes. And the artists responded and adapted, rereading cubist, expressionist and metaphysical experiments.
The abstract art exhibition at Quitandinha then presented these influences. Experimental artists, students in the studios of other artists, such as the one of professor Fayga Ostrower, or at Getúlio Vargas Foundation courses, who had the courage to continue with geometrical exercises and informal gestures, very stimulated by innovation such as those brought by the studios and free courses in modern art museums, as well as at the 1st São Paulo Biennial of Art, in a country marked by nationalist modernism. However, this dichotomy today makes very little sense.
Anna Bella Geiger, Fayga Ostrower, Lygia Pape, Lygia Clark, Zélia Salgado, Aluísio Carvão, Décio Vieira, Antônio Bandeira, Abraham Palatnik, Rossini Perez, Tomás Santa Rosa, among other participants in the Quitandinha exhibition, developed broader careers. Often marked by aesthetic-formal research in line with social issues of interest to the modernist group. Even considering a geographic plurality of art, since Rossini, Bandeira, Palatnik and Santa Rosa were born in the Northeast of Brazil.
Thinking about the 1st National Exhibition of Abstract Art in Brazil, today, back to its original environment is to look at each and every one of its participants, recognizing such pioneering spirit, but perceiving the gesture of art as one that can be adapted and amalgamated to the signs of change and courage.
Anna Bella and the 70 Years of Abstract - Abstract Art Exhibition at Quitandinha
Curaduría
Marcelo Campos
Edición y tratamiento de imagen
Tratamento da Imagem