The Women's Century: Female Perspectives in Brazilian Art
https://www.ceciliabrunsonprojects.com/
Cecilia Brunson Projects is pleased to present The Women’s Century — Female Perspectives in Brazilian Art. Presented in association with curator Kiki Mazzucchelli, this selection of works foregrounds the unique role played by women in the development of modern and contemporary art in Brazil. This group exhibition brings together works by artists from different generations and spanning several movements and styles. The selection of works includes Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973), Eleonore Koch (1926-2018), Lygia Pape (1927-2004), Lygia Clark (1920-1988), Miriam Inez da Silva (1937-1996), Beatriz Milhazes (b. 1960) and Adriana Varejão (b.1964).
In the 1920s, several Brazilian artists, writers and musicians had already embraced the idea of forging an avant-garde that combined native and regional references with elements taken from European modernism. It is widely acknowledged that the first exhibition of modern art in the country took place in 1917, when expressionist painter Anita Malfatti (1889-1964) presented more than fifty ground-breaking works in São Paulo, shaking the cultural establishment and fuelling the debate around the need for new approaches in art-making. This culminated in 1922 in the legendary São Paulo arts festival – the Modern Art Week.
The creation of the first modern art museums in Brazil in the late 1940s coincided with the emergence of a new generation of artists who fervently embraced geometric abstraction. Three of the artists included in The Women’s Century started their careers at the height of this new trend in Brazilian art; all have embraced and expanded the vocabulary of geometric abstraction into new directions.
