Anna Bella Geiger

was among the first Brazilian artists to experiment with video as Art.
Her first artworks, pure abstractions in painting and engraving, launched her career in the early 1950s. Her studies and encounters with artists in New York City during an extensive stay 1953-54 and often thereafter, widened her interest in progressive options for art topics and artmaking. Beyond her celebrated abstract achievements, she is also noted for multimedia works that contemplate Brazilian identity – national, historical, geographical, social, political and personal.
In response to socio-political conditions, precipitated by a coup and the establishment of military dictatorship (1964-1985), Geiger’s approach shifted in  the 1960s – first, toward visceral figuration, and then, temporarily away from painting altogether.

In the early 1970s Geiger explored various media to examine how national identity is appropriated and re-constructed as propaganda for political and economic agendas.  Geiger analyzed how various versions of past and present reflect indigenous and immigrant communities and how beliefs and policies impact the future of a land that is vast, eco-dynamic, fragile and sacred. This topic continues to be a throughline shared by many Brazilian artists and Geiger’s legion of students.

In 1974 filmmaker Jom Tob Azulay introduced her to video making. The medium provided a new means to analyze the interface between history and memory. Collage, photography, metal and wax sculpture, super 8 film, found-object and text-based works assemblage and artists books as well as installations and performance (she terms Actions), were among the means she cultivated for her artistic arsenal. While covertly resisting the regime, she not only oversaw raising her four children but also emerged as a prolific and influential artist, activist and professor of art.

Her black and white videos from the mid 1970s are as inventive as any that emerged during this period throughout the art world. Her best known early video is Passagens I, 1974 (restored & remastered by BFVPP). For the duration, just under ten minutes, viewers follow Geiger, footstep by footstep, as she climbs three staircases in and near her neighborhood. A close camera observes as she ascends,  plodding on, as if lost or perhaps entrapped, in some enigmatic routine. She seems to be pacing out,  marking or counting time, but her climbing leads to nothing. In Brazil many art critics were skeptical about whether video could resonate as Fine Art. The international debut of her works in Videoarte Brasil 1975, revealed her patient poetry to be as universal as it is timeless.

By the 1980s the artist re-embraced painting but also perpetuated her multi-media endeavors.
Geiger’s appointments to museum and academic teaching positions continued to expand, notably at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage and Columbia University. Her works collected and presented worldwide and included in the XXXIX Venice Biennale, 1980. She was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1983 for film research.  Also among her many distinctions, Geiger co-authored with Fernando Cocchiarale, a landmark study,  Abstracionismo geometrico e informal: A vanguarda brasileira nos anos cinquenta (Temas e debates), 1987. This collection of essays and interviews produced in 1987 and reprinted in 2004 remains an influential resource.

In the 21st century, Geiger’s older and current artworks continue to make waves. Her achievements have been showcased in notable exhibitions such as Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 and a major retrospective, Anna Bella Geiger: Native Brazil/Alien Brazil (the Netherlands, Belgium, Brazil). Among her ongoing projects is Circa, 2006-2019, a multi-media installation that morphs in each iteration. Initial editions featured a model of a crumbling pyramid within the ruins of a sandy excavation site.  Adjacent projection, added ruminations about the manipulation of dates and narratives that emerge from archeological discoveries.  To date, the artist has adapted the work for each host venue incorporating locally-sourced sand and adjusting emphasis to illuminate how these notions mirror issues in local histories and current global situations.  Circa, reflects her ingenuity for engaging meanings, materials, timeliness, timelessness and contemporaneous zeitgeist. Ever-provocative, Geiger questions how past monuments and artifacts are deployed to “attest” to conquest, culture and collective identity and how this circumstance informs history and memory.

Countless Brazilian and international exhibitions affirm the continuing relevance of Geiger’s themes and experimentation. She has remained as devoted to her studio endeavors as she is to presenting courses, lectures, interviews and commentaries. Her impact is ever-expanding among those who study her and, those who have, or currently, study with this tireless pioneer.