Anna Bella GeigerNative Brazil/Alien Brazil

Chantal Pattyn’s selection for her storefront.

The name of Anna Bella Geiger (°1933) ended up in my mailbox twice in a short time. Via a press release from the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, where 15 women between 71 and 105 years old are put in the picture in the exhibition Another Energy. Power to Continue Challenging (including ‘our’ Lili Dujourie) and through the SMAK, where an overview of the work of Anna Bella Geiger that can be seen until the beginning of November. Geiger is Brazilian, but of Polish Jewish descent. With such roots you can spend a lifetime thinking about identity, hegemony and representation. But also about the function of art itself. If art wants to say something about the world, is the conceptual sufficient? Her powerful and often poetical work covers all media. Now that we western people all end up in postcolonial thinking, it is good to look at the work Geiger made with postcards, in which the indigenous is on display. Geiger was ahead of her time. Now that she’s a grand old lady, you have to go to the SMAK for Native Brazil/ Alien Brazil. Or you can get this beautiful book at home. If you sit down and read and look, just take a moment to reflect on all Brazilians who are affected by Bolsonaro, who wants to free the country and its residents now with the Copa América.
Chantal Pattyn

“Brazilian artist Anna Bella Geiger (born 1933) was one of the first artists to engage in abstract art in Brazil, participating in the historic exhibition of Brazilian abstract art held in Rio de Janeiro in 1953. Since the 1970s she has also worked with video, conceptual art and mail art.

Native Brazil/Alien Brazil, named after her provocative political postcard series from 1976, covers the artist’s entire seven-decade career from the 1950s to the present, providing an overview of the extraordinary scope and diversity of Geiger’s work and themes, including informal abstraction, self-portraits, maps, landscapes and equations, as well as the artist’s interest in the interior of the human body, and her critiques of art systems and analyses of political and historical issues of Brazil.”