The Guggenheim shows Tarsila

The Guggenheim shows Tarsila, who confronted the art of Brazil and the European avant-garde
Bilbao (EFE).- The 2025 programming of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao shows Tarsila do Amaral, an artist considered a central figure of Brazilian modernism who tried to "subvert" the cultural relationship of her country with the avant-garde movements of Europe in the 20th century.

The curators of the exhibition Cecilia Braschi and Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, and Juan Ignacio Vidarte, general director of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, have explained that the exhibition "Tarsila do Amaral. Painting modern Brazil", from February 21 to June 1, represents a new reading of the artistic career of a "strong", "iconic and pioneering" Latin woman.
Brazil and Paris

Tarsila (her stage name) lived between 1886 and 1973, and in the 1920s she moved between São Paulo and Paris, becoming a bridge between the avant-garde movements of these two cultural capitals, the curators said.
She was born into a very wealthy family two years after Brazil abolished slavery, and studied art as a child, so that when she arrived in Paris, "she knew the avant-garde movements better than the French" and thus, "she did not copy" Cubism and Primitivism, but had her own "strategy."

In this way, Tarsila "invents and creates," presenting Brazil "to the world in a new way."

The exhibition chronologically reflects Tarsila's life and work, with photographs from when she was a child, self-portraits and catalogues of her exhibitions, as well as drawings and oil paintings from 1918 to 1960, that is, 147 works from her entire artistic career, with many works almost unpublished.
The Bilbao exhibition

Divided into six thematic sections, the exhibition allows us to discover this creator with her first more realistic works, other paintings that were inspired by the indigenous and popular imagination, in a commitment to fusion and exoticism.

It also explains "the modernizing dynamics of her country in full transformation throughout the 20th century," in the social and cultural spheres.

"As a female artist, in a male universe, she did not have it easy," explained Cecilia Braschi, who considered that Tarsila "deserves to be rediscovered now."

She is, therefore, said Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, an "important and necessary figure to know the Latin American art of the 20th century", with many outstanding women.

For his part, Juan Ignacio Vidarte has indicated that this exhibition shows "the marked feminine character" of the Bilbao center's programming for this 2025.

Thus, the retrospective of "a fundamental figure in the forging of a movement that had as its central objective the search for a more authentic, ethnic and multicultural Brazil that, in some way, revised its relationship with European centers and colonialism" has been organized, Vidarte has reflected.

In addition, he wanted to "highlight Tarsila, as "an emancipated, independent and ahead of her time artist, always in a permanent change", whose figure "I believe is still very relevant today."

The exhibition coming to Bilbao is a collaborative project between the Guggenheim and the Grand Palais des Arts in France, which has already been exhibited at the Luxembourg Museum in Paris.
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