November 29, 2019–March 1, 2020
MASP - Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand
Avenida Paulista, 1578
São Paulo
Brazil
Hours: Tuesday 10am-8pm
Wednesday - Sunday 10am-6pm
T +55 11 3149 5959
masp.org.br
Sesc Avenida Paulista
Avenida Paulista, 119
São Paulo
Brazil
Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 10am-9:30pm
Sunday 10am-6:30pm
T +55 11 3170-0800
sescsp.org.br/avenidapaulista
Anna Bella Geiger (Rio de Janeiro, 1933) is a pioneering artist in the Brazilian scene, with a truly innovative and experimental work that intercrosses dimensions and symbolisms of various orders: political and personal, corporal and conceptual, formal and aesthetic. Geiger was one of the first artists to engage in abstract art in Brazil, participating in the historic and inaugural exhibition of Brazilian abstract art held at the Quitandinha Hotel, in Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro, in 1953. Since the 1970s she has also worked with video, conceptual art and mail art.
Organized by MASP in partnership with Sesc São Paulo, this show borrows its title from one of Geiger’s most emblematic works, Native Brazil/Alien Brazil (1976/1977), which serves as a starting point and common thread for the exhibition. In this series, the artist appropriates postcards that represent in an idealized way the daily life of the Bororo, an indigenous people of the state of Mato Grosso. These images are seen to be quite perverse when considered in the context of 1970s Brazil, when the indigenous peoples were suffering from the violence of the military dictatorship’s policies. For each postcard, the artist developed rereadings based on portraits of herself and her family, made on the veranda of her house. In this work, as in various others, Geiger questions the hegemonic narratives, Brazil’s colonial past and the country’s social reality, articulating politics, self-representation, irony and fiction, often based on an autobiographical perspective.
The show features 190 artworks, produced in the period spanning from the 1950s to today, in different formats, media and languages, providing an overview of the extraordinary scope of Geiger’s work. The exhibition thus includes informal abstraction, the artist’s interest in the interior of the human body, self-portraits, maps, landscapes and equations, as well as criticism of art systems and analyses of political and historical issues of Brazil.
At MASP, Geiger’s artistic path is presented in seven sections: Self-Portraits (1951–2003), Viscera (1965–1969), Maps and Geographies (1972–2018), About Art (1973–2018), Notebooks (1974–1977), History of Brazil (1975–2015), and Soft and Nocturnal (1984–1986). At Sesc Avenida Paulista, three of Geiger’s historical installations are being shown especially for this exhibition—Circumambulatio (1972); Soft Table, Frieze and Video (16th Bienal de São Paulo, 1981), and Undifferentiated (2001)—along with the three videos Passages 1 (1974), Passages 2 (1974) and Wireless Phone (1976).
Anna Bella Geiger: Native Brazil/Alien Brazil, on view through March 1st, 2020, is curated by Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director, and Tomás Toledo, chief curator, MASP. The fully illustrated 288-page catalogue accompanying the exhibition, organized by the curators and co-published by MASP and Edições Sesc, in separate editions in Portuguese and English, features newly commissioned texts by the curators as well as by Danilo Santos Miranda, Bernardo Mosqueira, Zanna Gilbert, Estrella de Diego, Philippe Van Cauteren, Gabriela de Laurentiis and an interview with Anna Bella Geiger by Pedrosa.
For further information about the publications, contact loja [at] masp.org.br and lojasesc [at] sescsp.org.br
