Anna Bella Geiger

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1933

            Of Judeo-Polish origin, Anna Bella Geiger was born in Rio de Janeiro, where she currently resides. She graduated in German literature, studied under the artist Fayga Ostrower—a fellow Jewish refugee of Polish descent—and later left Brazil for New York, where she completed her artistic training at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and New York University. From a young age and continuing to this day, she has taught at various institutions, including Columbia University in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, and the Higher Institute for Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium. While the foundation of her work lies in her early affinity for drawing as a tool for openness and self-discovery—evident in her earliest works—one of the defining traits of her pioneering career is the wide range of techniques and formats she has employed, including printmaking, photomontage, screen printing, painting, sculpture, installation, and video.

            In this sense, Geiger finds in each of these formal variations a gateway into different worlds, held together by a common thread: a desire to explore the relationship between the material in which an idea takes form and the appropriateness of each medium as a space for its visualization. Cartography, among other subjects, has been a particularly rich source of iconographic and conceptual interest in her work since the 1970s. Frequently infused with autobiographical narratives, her use of maps and geographical imagery—intertwined with her personal life—drives her poetic imagination and political engagement toward questions of territory, its configuration, and its history. In the drawing of borders and contours, she finds a fertile space for reflecting on the power of art to create new realities and possible regimes of action. Through silhouettes, coordinates, projections, atlases, postcards, and across a wide range of materials—from photographs, notebooks, and encyclopedia pages to slices of bread, aluminum sheets, and library drawers—her work explores the means by which landscapes and the people of Brazil are represented. She questions and parodies the apparent uniformity of national culture, exposing the colonial violence and environmental devastation it conceals, as well as the repression of the fundamental heterogeneity of the Brazilian people.

            Her works have traveled the globe and are housed in major museums and collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Fogg Museum in Cambridge, the Getty Foundation in Los Angeles, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, among many others.