GEOGRAPHY OF SUBVERSION - ANNA BELLA GEIGER
About to turn 92, Anna Bella Geiger, from Rio de Janeiro, never ceases to attest to her robust experimental side with each new exhibition featuring snippets of her shifting production. Both in Brazil and abroad, in solo and group shows, her body of work remains indomitable, uncompromising and full of meaning.
“Anna Bella Geiger's work is vastness”, as the curator and artist Ana Hortides rightly points out in Quase Mapa, Quase Mancha, a solo show presented at the Mendes Wood DM gallery in São Paulo, which brings together installation, video, painting and engraving (and above all, by extension, graphic thinking) in works that are difficult to define.
In the same city, until July this year, the radical Circumambulatio project is being shown at MAC-USP (Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo), which has not been set up since 1973. The show reveals the artist's bold, risk-averse, laboratory approach, which mixes conceptual art, land art and environmental art in media such as photography, video art and writings, making the work permeable and questioning decades after its initial proposition.
The centerpiece of the exhibition at the Brazilian gallery that represents it is a remake of the one inaugurated at the 16th São Paulo Biennial in 1981. Mesa, Friso e Vídeos Macios synthesizes much of Geiger's audacious attitude, which, through simple camera movements, turns camouflages arranged on a table into matter that can metamorphose into almost maps, almost stains, as the title of the show stresses. So, in this set of panels, table and videos, a locus is formed that can evoke both a warlike spirit - Brazil was still going through years of military dictatorship - and a cinematic one, in which the setting suggests an experience of suspense like a good film noir.
The unstable experience of the installation is spread across two other sets of works.
On one wall, five prints show the strength of this aspect in the artist's production. “Anna Bella Geiger's field of operation is graphics,” said British critic Guy Brett (1942-2021) in 2004.
In an adjoining room with works dating back to the 1970s, Geiger frayed the supports, materially speaking, of painting and engraving, in paintings such as Dilúvio, from 1987, Nuvens 1 and Nuvens 2, from 1980, and in the photo-serigraph Curva em Verde, from 1985. The soft surfaces, the Macios, can support the unfolding of an artist who started out among the best abstract artists in the country and, little by little, questioned the foundations of the language in concept and form.
“It wasn't that I was thinking of making another painting. It was more in the sense that it presented elements unknown to me, which I attribute to a conceptual thought about its nature and meaning. I started from the idea as an idea,” she recalls about the process of creating the works, in a text accompanying the exhibition.
The remake of Circumambulatio (a Latin word meaning to walk around) takes us back to a pre-internet world, in which information, artistic practices and other elements of our daily lives did not have hypermaximized circulation.
However, due to numerous factors, a certain spirit of time led to the emergence of styles such as land art and environmental art, with possible formal similarities and yet distinct and numerous results after the most varied processes - let's remember that this all took place before the much-vaunted globalization, which also clearly extended to the visual arts. Today, ecological manifestations would not exist as we know them without the pioneering work of Geiger and others of her generation around the world.
Encouraged by the legendary Walter Zanini (1925-2013), director of the museum in São Paulo at the time, the installation by the artist from Rio de Janeiro was brought to the MAC after having been shown in 1972 at the MAM-RJ (Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro), also a driving force behind experimentalism in Brazil. A 109-slide audiovisual, soundtracked by texts by Jung (1875-1961) and uncommercial music by the Germans from Can and the British progressive band Emerson, Lake & Palmer, was based on the experiments of a group led by Geiger at the Marapendi lagoon, at the time a remote place in Rio de Janeiro.
In these beyond-the-visual actions, photographer Thomas Lewinsohn was responsible for the records, plus more data from various sources collected by the artist's students. In this immense notepad subject to metamorphoses of all kinds, the idea of the center is discussed, materialized and dismantled in numerous ways.
A work of art that is open and in a permanent state of questioning and rethinking.
Immensely relevant and powerful, Anna Bella Geiger's work can be seen at the same MAC, in the group show Graphic Experiments (until February 23); in the group show Era Uma Vez - Visões do Céu e da Terra, at Pinacoteca de SP (until April 27); and abroad, in Shanghai, China, in the group show Another Avant-Garde. Photography 1970-2000, at the West Bund Museum, and Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960-1991, at the Museum of Modern Art in Luxembourg.
Circumambulatio
Until July 27, 2025
MAC-USP - Av. Pedro Álvares Cabral, 1301, São Paulo
Quase Mapa, Quase Mancha
Until February 1, 2025
Mendes Wood DM Gallery - Rua Barra Funda, 216, São Paulo
