MASP

Anna Bella Geiger began her artist practice in the 1950s, when artistic languages, and ideas about what art is, were in constant transformation. Initially working with prints, the artist quickly expanded her media and began to produce videos, installations and varied objects. From the 1970s, she also produced paintings, exploring other formats and surfaces beyond the traditional canvas on four stretcher bars. This can be seen in the series Macios [Soft], made of elliptic padded canvases, at times overlaid and cropped, like in the triangular sections that appear in A parte [The Part] and O todo [The Whole] (1970–90), and in the installations O pão nosso de cada dia [Our Daily Bread] (1978–80) and Mesa, friso e vídeo macios [Soft Table, Frieze and Video] (1981), which already made use of padded and painted structures. The Macios are made of fragments that move between the abstract and the figurative, placed in sections of the canvas cut by diagonals. In Macios com ilusões abstratas [Soft with Abstract Illusions], we see geometric elements that revisit the abstract experimentation of her early career. Some of the shapes suggest celestial bodies or fragments of machines, glass and metal, evoking to some extent the human body forms found in the series Viscerais [Visceral] (1965–69). There is also an allusion to photographs of the lunar surface, such as in the series Polaridades/Lunares [Polarities/Lunar] (1973–74), with images which appear to have been printed and pasted onto the painting. The procedure of merging fragments to make a single form, with multiple elements and the overlapping of different languages – such as here, where the artist transposes multiple lunar images onto one single painting – is a constant operation in Geiger’s work, which both challenges and dilutes the limits between the different media, styles and themes it employs.

—Matheus de Andrade, research assistant, MASP, 2023

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