Circa MMXVIII Human Landscape Anna Bella Geiger

Overview
Letter: to Anna Bella Geiger

The art world today is developing like a territory, a domain with unspoken rules and codes. The artist is hereby imperceptibly deployed as the seeming protagonist of an artistic caravan. The direction is unclear, but the caravan is moving, like a turbulent horde. The artist’s oeuvre must preferably be recognizable and cryptically readable. For more than five decades already, Anna Bella Geiger has been an artist who has gone against the caravan, whose artistic approach is driven by experiment and commitment. Rio de Janeiro is her operational setting; the world is the screen against which the work unfolds supremely. Each work by Anna Bella Geiger is like a geological section. Drawing on her personal perspective, the artist engraves and marks the frictions between ideological, geographical, political, and cultural elements. Her work is the result of a consistently critical attitude where an aesthetic ability is always anchored ethically. Anna Bella Geiger acts alertly and uses art as a means to unravel systems of power and control, such as maps and borders, into a formal spectrum. As an artist, Anna Bella Geiger has developed a body of work that takes shape conceptually and tactilely. By this I mean that the artist has appropriated every medium (painting, design, video, assemblage, etc.), offering resistance to the conventions of the day. The work of Anna Bella Geiger is a translation of the artist’s layered identity in an artistic corpus that raises the question of how, as an artist, one can take up a position that can effectively offer an answer to the latent oppression of ideological and other mechanisms. For the artist, the associative stratification of the image is a strategic wager that deconstructs conventions. Anna Bella Geiger is an artist who often uses the contours of a country, Brazil, as a universal reflection and metaphor on the inability to think and act as a human being limitlessly and without borders.

– Philippe Van Cauteren, Sharjah, 26 March 2018
Works
Installation Views