Tarsila do Amaral: Painting Modern Brazil

Organized by the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and le GrandPalaisRmn

Curatorial team: Cecilia Braschi, leading curator and curator of the exhibition in Paris and Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, curator at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents Tarsila do Amaral. Painting Modern Brazil, an ambitious exhibition dedicated to an artist considered a key figure of Brazilian modernism. Divided into six thematic sections, the exhibition allows visitors to discover Tarsila do Amaral (or just Tarsila, her artistic name) as the creator of an original and evocative body of work, drawing on both indigenous and popular imagery and on modernizing forces of a rapidly-transforming country.

In the 1920s, moving between São Paulo and Paris, Tarsila ferried between the avant-gardes of these two cultural capitals and constructed a “Brazilian” iconographic world filtered through the lens of Cubism and Primitivism in vogue in the French capital at the time. Her painting then inspired the Pau-Brasil and Anthropophagic movements, whose search for an “authentic,” multicultural, and multiracial Brazil aimed to refound the country’s relationship with the European “centers” of colonization.

The activist dimension of Tarsila’s paintings from the 1930s and their ability to accompany the profound transformations of her social and urban environment until the 1960s confirm the strength of an oeuvre attuned to her time, always willing to reinvent itself, despite the unstable conditions of the different times and contexts that an independent woman artist had to face.

With her invitation to delve into a Brazilian modernity that she contributed to forging even more than she painted it, Tarsila reveals in her production all the complexity of this concept always subject to debate, which raises identity and societal questions of great importance even today, both in Brazil and Europe.