THE MODERNITY OF TARSILA DO AMARAL TAKES OVER THE GUGGENHEIM IN BILBAO

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao hosts a retrospective exhibition of Tarsila do Amaral (Capivari, Brazil, 1886 - São Paulo, Brazil, 1973) focused on her conception and renovation of painting, as well as on her recognition as one of the key and most representative figures of the entry of avant-garde and modernizing pictorial languages in Latin America. A central name in Brazilian modernism, her style was consecrated as her own identity, a product of her desires and experiences, evoking both indigenous themes and the modernizing processes of a Brazil that was undergoing a constant transformation.

February 26, 2025
Álvaro de Benito

Tarsila do Amaral. Painting Modern Brazil traces the vital and artistic milestones of the Brazilian artist, analyzing the critical importance of her stay in Paris in the 1920s and her exposure to the avant-garde movements of cubism and primitivism, both fundamental in her syncretic proposal of themes and techniques to begin to create a universe of expression that was specific to her environment and interests with the aspiration to modernize and recognize, in that bridge that was, the historical relationships, anthropology and industrialization.

 

Although her critical attitude with certain avant-garde processes contrasts and contrasts interests of eminent Brazilian character, this was fundamental in the development of the concept and the matrix of much of her proposal. The distance in Europe will allow her to reconnect in another way, allowing her to integrate her origins in the pictorial evolution and in the birth of this new landscape rethinking.

São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro or rural Minas Gerais will be immortalized with lines and geometric shapes to consolidate her vision and consecrate a new imaginary that can respond both to her concerns and to external demands and that will derive, later, in a certain symbolism rooted in that Anthropophagic Movement that is key in the development of the avant-garde in Brazil.

 

The exhibition offers also, through the selection of works, a profound reading of a specific period that not only changed socially and economically, but also affected Tarsila do Amaral's possibilities for artistic development, trapped between the realities of decades of upheaval, her exposure to Marxist ideology and social realism, and the production that, as a witness, she managed to capture with aesthetic criteria and testimony.

 

Tarsila do Amaral. Painting Modern Brazil is on view through June 1 at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Abandoibarra Etorbidea, 2, Bilbao (Spain).

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