Anna Bella Geiger, Physical and Human Geography, Andalusian Contemporary Art Center

There is a lot of dedication, radical reflection and deep decorum in the works of the artist Anna Bella Geiger (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1933), one of the most solid creators of her generation, who perhaps has not received all the recognition deserved for being a woman, as has often happened with artists. In spite of everything, Geiger’s career has been luminous since its origins, very soon abandoning his abstract beginnings of the 50s of the XX to enter fully into conceptualizing proposals, especially after his trip to New York in the 1970s -in full development of its conceptual stage – where it comes into contact with Acconci and Beuys.

However, even those years of abstract painting were already contaminated by the teaching of Fayga Ostrower, the Polish teacher of Jewish origin who lives in Rio and with whom Geiger learns engraving. Along with engraving, he also learns the freedom to create without the pressure of the unique work – part of that discourse of imposed power. The very concept of repetition and series associated with this technique constitute, little by little, fascinating strategies against the discourse of authority, often camouflaged, to which Geiger frequently resorts.

Thus, the decade of the 70s of the XX represents the basic development of two of its great themes that are repeated in proposals where it frequently returns to a certain strategy that could be called “apparent series”. It is the formula of representation that he cultivates through the years, of the subtle changes, of the parodied strategies, and that is slipping into the numerous media that Geiger addresses throughout his career – a very early use of video, drawing, photography, three-dimensional works, collage, appropriation… Physical geography and human geography become, in this way, the excuses that serve Anna Bella to reflect on issues related to colonial policies, cultural stereotypes, exclusions, discourses imposed by hegemony… and, especially, the ways of questioning them from refined, fragile, delicate ways at every step that turn their political objects into poetic objects.

In the exhibition that is presented here -the first monograph in the Spanish State- the subtlety of this artist’s work, her political commitment, her peculiar subversion of chronologies are highlighted – when devising a repertoire of particular times, ranging and they come–, the diversity of the means we use, their subtlest sense of humor –that parodic feature that allows them to get away from things. In short, those reflections from a physical and human geography where the world must rewrite itself, to narrate, from a different perspective.

Biography
Anna Bella Geiger, (born 1933, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) is a Brazilian multi-disciplinary artist of Jewish-Polish ancestry, and professor at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage. She lives in Rio de Janeiro, and her work, characterized by the use of different media, is held by galleries and private collections in the US, China, Brazil and Europe.

Her parents were raised in Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski, Poland. They moved to Brazil ten years before her birth. Her father was a craftman.

Geiger first graduated in literature and language from Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and later in the 1950s, studied art at Rio’s Instituto Fayga Ostrower. She moved to New York in 1954 where she took classes in Art History at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, returning to Rio the following year. In 1965 she attended an engraving workshop at the Museo de Arte Moderno, where she began teaching three years later. She returned to New York in 1969 to teach at Columbia University, returning again to Rio in 1970.

In the 1970s Geiger, an abstract artist, began to include representational elements into her work, and use photographic engraving, photomontage, assemblage, sculpture, and video. In the 1980s she concentrated on painting, and in the early 1990s on cartographic imagery cast in metal, and iron archive box constructions incorporating plaited metals and hot-wax painting (encaustic). Besides painting and engraving, her current work combines Installation art with video. In Rio in 2006, Geiger constructed an installation, Circe, that included a scale model of Ancient Egyptian ruins and performance video; the installation was recreated in 2009.

In 1983 Geiger became a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Publications and collections
Geiger’s works are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Fogg Museum, Cambridge; The Getty Foundation, Los Angeles; Museu Serralves, Porto; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. Exhibitions of her work have been held in London, Tokyo, Warsaw, Ottawa, Portugal and Puerto Rico.

Geiger’s 1978 “A Pao Nosso de Cada Dia”, (Our Daily Bread,) original photographic postcard of which there are five exemplars, are held at the Blanton Museum of Art Austin, Texas Tepper Takayama Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, and the Harvard Fogg Museum. Her prints are also held in the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Niteroi.

In 1987 Geiger, with art critic professor Fernando Cocchiarale, published “Abstracionismo Geometrico e Informal: a vanguard brasileira nos anos cinquenta” (Informal and Geometric Abstraction: the Brazilian avant-garde in the fifties).

In 2005, Geiger’s work was included in the electronic journal Confraria do Vento, edited by Márcio-André, Victor Paes, and Ronaldo Ferrito, in collaboration with the graduate department of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro.

The Exhibition
The Andalusian Center for Contemporary Art presents “Anna Bella Geiger. Physical and Human Geography” the first solo exhibition in a Spanish museum by the Brazilian artist Anna Bella Geiger (Rio de Janeiro. Brazil. 1933), whose curator is Estrella de Diego.

An essential artist in the analysis of the construction of new ways of seeing in the 70s, the exhibition held at the CAAC presents around one hundred videos, photographs, artist’s books, photocollage and three-dimensional works centered on two proposals that They have gone through their career: physical geography and human geography.

As has happened with other artists of her generation and in other historical moments, the work of Anna Bella Geiger has not had the visibility that her male colleagues.

Despite the radical nature of Geiger’s work, and being one of the first artists to use video as a form of expression in art in Brazil, there is often the feeling that its projection and visibility do not correspond to the high quality of its work, although in recent years it has been valued by critics and galleries, as well as by institutions such as the MOMA in New York or the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid.

In fact, Anna Bella Geiger’s work is present in the best international museums and collections, such as the MOMA in New York, the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, The Getty Collection in Los Angeles, Victoria & Albert Museum and Tate Gallery in London, or in Spain at Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Macba in Barcelona and the Cgac in Santiago de Compostela.

In the words of the curator of the exhibition, Professor of Art History, Estrella de Diego, “the exhibition” Physical and Human Geography “joins the effort that the CAAC has been making to rescue these women who, like America in the Anna Bella Geiger’s maps hope to recover the place that by their own merits corresponds to them in the founding story of the modern ”.

One of the elements frequently used in the work by Anna Bella Geiger are maps. Geiger draws maps, territory historically assigned to men as a spatial conception to review the political concept of said space. With this approach, she aspires for women to recover that territory that has been denied them, or as Commissioner Estrella de Diego comments: “she proposes new geographies when she embroiders the maps to remember the subversiveness of the needle too – stitching, uniting. And he wonders how many maps have to be subverted to turn the narrative around and start counting again, giving the needle the visibility and women the space that history has denied them. ”

In any case, it would seem interesting to remember the Jewish-Polish origin of the Anna Bella Geiger family, a family with other customs, another culture, other stories to remember. “The map of America thus becomes its own and alien to a time, a place where history is rewritten at every step.”

The map thus ends up having enough of camouflaged autobiographical work, that camouflage that the artist likes so much, being able to see the world as a native and as a foreigner.

In the 1950s, Anna Bella Geiger participates in the First Petrópolis Exhibition of Abstract Art. Although her work is “contaminated” by the teachings of the Polish teacher of Jewish origin, Fayga Ostrower, with whom she learns engraving, “and what, in the words of the curator, means the freedom to create without the need for a unique work of art. ”

From very early he begins to work with collages and drawings, photomontages, video, photographs, artist books and installations…. In 1954 he traveled to New York, where he attended courses and met Henry Kahnweiler, a famous art dealer of surrealist artists, who took an interest in his work and acquired some of his works. He will return in the 70s, at which time he comes into contact with personalities such as Acconci and Beuys.

After finishing her studies in English literature at the University of Brazil, in 1956 she married the geographer Pedro Geiger. There he participates in national and international exhibitions and is part of the collective exhibition “The Brazilian Engraving” in 1970, presented in São Paulo.

During the 1970s Anna Bella Geiger developed the two main themes that are repeated in proposals that use series as a formula for representation: physical geography –maps– and human geography –revision of cultural stereotypes.

Maps, a constant in his work that are organized in different techniques, will be, according to Estrella de Diego “the common thread of that poetic discourse /

politician who uses spatial metaphors. The map becomes, as in the case of the Uruguayan Torres García, a territory of subversion.

For Anna Bella Geiger, “Maps are somewhat akin to representing the world, with all the implications of control and mastery that the term ‘representation’ itself entails,” says De Diego. Perhaps Geiger sees the world both from within and without, as a native and as a foreigner – as the mythical work “Native Brazil / Foreign Brazil” shows. Some postcards –a resource often used by Geiger along with photography– that represent the typical of Brazil, what they say is Brazil, are imitated by her and her friends – the foreigners – in photos that reproduce the same poses, confronting what inside and outside in a work that, always happens with Geiger, shows a delicacy, intelligence, camouflaged radicalism and a fascinating introspection.

The artist resorts to new narrative formulas, especially those that seek to reverse the ways of telling the world from a masculine position. He adopts, then, a broken identity and narration, full of repetitions and false repetitions of those that Duchamp, one of his favorite artists, liked so much.

Andalusian Contemporary Art Center
The Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (CAAC) was created in February 1990 with the aim of giving the local community an institution for the research, conservation and promotion of contemporary art. Later the centre began to acquire the first works in its permanent collection of contemporary art.

In 1997 the Cartuja Monastery became the centre’s headquarters, a move which was to prove decisive in the evolution of the institution. The CAAC, an autonomous organisation dependent on the Andalusian Government (Junta de Andalucía), took over the collections of the former Conjunto Monumental de la Cartuja (Cartuja Monument Centre) and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Sevilla (Contemporary Art Museum of Seville).

From the outset, one of the main aims of the centre has been to develop a programme of activities attempting to promote the study of contemporary international artistic creation in all its facets. Temporary exhibitions, seminars, workshops, concerts, meetings, recitals, film cycles and lectures have been the communication tools used to fulfil this aim.

The centre’s programme of cultural activities is complemented by a visit to the monastery itself, which houses an important part of our artistic and archaeological heritage, a product of our long history.