Norma Bessouet (1940-2018)
(OBITUARY) by Sebastian Spreng
The disappearance of Norma Bessouet on June 11 in Buenos Aires indicates an important loss for Argentine art that can not and should not be overlooked. A colorful teacher, illustrator and portrait painter, owner of a captivating lyricism, goldsmith of art and alchemist of painting and engraving as the masters with whom she perfected herself in Italy and England after graduating from the Prilidiano Pueyrredón in 1967, Bessouet spent for Spain to settle in New York where she lived between 1981 and 2015 when she returned to Buenos Aires.
She had won the Pollock-Krassner Scholarship three times and the National Hall Honor Grand Prize in 1970 (drawing). With important retrospectives at the Museum of Fine Arts in Caracas in 2011 and Buenos Aires in 1999, his work is inscribed within a magical realism of proverbial exquisiteness and candor as well as his person, affable, generous, warm and enigmatic. In his painting the horses and jungles of Uccello, the labyrinths and beings of the borgiano universe, the birds, elephants and Hindu deities, the infantas, esperpentos and bald women, as well as the delicious portraits of the children of his friends, endowed with a mysticism as suggestive as cryptic. His decades out of Argentina where she returned and already sick, encourage in his country a deserved recognition of what they call "the Argentinian Leonora Carrington."
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Norma Bessouet (1940-2018)
