Ana Bidart: Long Before the Walls

Delfina Foundation is pleased to present Long Before the Walls, the first European solo exhibition by Uruguayan artist Ana Bidart. The exhibition introduces a constellation of newly commissioned, site-specific installations and interventions at the Delfina house.  

Through playful yet earnest acts of sculpting and in-situ drawing, Bidart unpacks her ongoing contemplation of history as a construct, of the fluid parallels between drawing and writing, and of the poetics of spatial and temporal negotiation.

The exhibition title Long Before the Walls underscores how Bidart challenges dominant constructions of history, and distills a visual language from a mark-making instinct that predates the fabrication of walls. She draws an analogy between a grand meteorite hitting the earth and a doodle on a misty window—it is all about how a graphic mark tells a story about inhabiting the world.

On a recent trip to study the prehistoric rock art in Serra da Capivara National Park in northeastern Brazil, Bidart became fascinated by the handprints and marks at the margins of the images. Who made such marks? Were they testing a pigment or playing around? In a conventional digitisation project by art historians or historians, those marks might not be captured. Yet the in-person encounter left a lasting impression on Bidart. This new commission attempts to capture the overwhelming sense of interconnectedness across centuries and reflect on the archetypes, narratives, and hierarchies we take for granted.

During her residency at Delfina Foundation in spring 2023, Bidart closely observed the architectural features of the Edwardian building and the ubiquitous traces left by its ever-changing inhabitants. The observations culminated in a series of ‘soft diaries’, where Bidart played with daily traces on small sheets of unstretched canvas, stitched together as books. After two years of further research and experiments with mark-making in various contexts, Bidart returned to the house in March 2025, and expanded the soft diaries into Dust Sheets, large, loose canvas sheets forming tent-like structures for audiences to navigate full-body. She first poured a thin layer of diluted oil on the canvas lying on the floor, then captured the half-an-hour window before the canvas dried to make marks on the highly sensitive surface.  “I’m not adding anything, I’m just revealing”, says Bidart.

For this exhibition, Bidart took residence again in the Delfina house. She first had three architectural elements reproduced in white and installed in the gallery: a handrail, a balustrade, and a corner of a fireplace. Over the course of two weeks, Bidart searched for a balance between structure and improvisation, where she used oil, pigments, body paint, makeup, and pencil to reenact the multi-layered stories of the space.

In a more subtle register, Bidart flirted with the ‘noises’ of the building such as light switches, sockets, and floor outlets—features one usually wishes to hide when putting on an art exhibition. She replaced the five recessed wood floorboards, all full of scratches from furniture moving, with hand engraved, off-white plaster boards titled Bedrocks. She dipped her fingertips in blue paint and tapped around the light switches in a finger dance. Scattered in the space you can find tiny objects made of rubber, cold porcelain, and papier-mâché, hand-modelled impromptu and inspired by the notion of babbling.

Rather than radical interventions that would wipe out the character of a space, Bidart’s creative process behind this exhibition is a constant act of spatial and temporal negotiation. The actions all stem from an active sense of imagination and resistance to see the world from a fixed, single point of view. Mundane forms are transmuted into rich stories, murmurs into syncopation and jazz. While remixing beats, she acknowledges the echoes; by playfully moving things and bodies out of alignment, she embraces the counterforce and tests the limits of freedom.

Considering handprints in cave paintings as the first record, the project speculates about the construct of a galaxy of pictorial languages of mark-making that evolved over time, connecting us with all our ancestors as well as linking the vastest stars to the minutest microorganism in the deep sea. Unlike writing, which is mainly taught through educational systems, the language of drawing and storytelling can be embodied and learned in myriad ways. One of which might be starting to feel it and play with it today.

Artist biography 
Ana Bidart (b.1985, Montevideo) is a visual artist based in the Yucatan Peninsula, working between Mexico and Uruguay. Her work has been exhibited in Latin America, the United States and Europe, including the National Museum of Visual Arts, Montevideo; Cabañas Museum, Guadalajara; Proyecto Paralelo, ESPAC and Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico City; Bienvenu Steinberg & J Gallery, New York City and Galerie Perrotin, Paris. Recent featured exhibitions include Pintura contemporánea en México, curated by Amanda de la Garza and Paula Duarte at Amparo Museum, Puebla, Mexico and Sala de Nado (Swimming Room), curated by Martín Craciun at W-galería, Buenos Aires, Argentina. 

In 2023, she was an artist in residence at Delfina Foundation, London, within the FAARA Conecta program in alliance with Fundación Ama Amoedo. Other artistic residencies and research programmes include: Pivô Pesquisa, São Paulo, Brazil (2024); Flora ars+natura, Bogotá, Colombia (2018); Casa Wabi Foundation, Oaxaca, México (2016). 

She is the author of Un golpe de suerte (2023), a drawing book for children published in Mexico by Piedra Ediciones with the support of Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo. 

Public programming 

Workshop 
Babbling hands: experimental modelling with Ana Bidart  
2–4pm, Saturday, April 5

Tours
Exhibition tour with Ana Bidart 
6–7pm, Tuesday, April 8  

Exhibition tour and breakfast with Curator, Erin Li  
9–10am, Tuesday, April 29  
10–11am, Saturday, May 10 

All events are free to attend, but booking is essential. Please visit https://www.delfinafoundation.com/whats-on/  

Credits 
This exhibition has been made possible thanks to support of Delfina Foundation’s Network of Patrons for Latin America and the Caribbean and the Ana Bidart exhibition circle including Catherine Petitgas, Fundación Ama Amoedo, and Erica Roberts.