Anna Bella Geiger
(Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1933) Multidisciplinary artist and professor at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage. Of Polish-Jewish ancestry, she lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. Her work, developed between painting, engraving and drawing, is characterized by the experimentation with audiovisual and installation media. Trained at the Fayga Ostrower Institute, she started in informal abstract art by participating in key exhibitions such as the iconic I Exposição Nacional de Arte Abstrata (1953). Later, after her travels and academic experiences in New York, she returned to Brazil and devoted herself to teaching and experimenting in museum education departments. In the late 1970s, in addition to her personal disenchantment with abstraction, Brazil's socio-political climate led her to explore the themes of identity and periphery through other fields of knowledge such as geography and sociology. From 1970 onwards, once she assumed them as central themes within her work, Anna Bella Geiger dedicated herself to exploring the relationships between colonial policies, cultural stereotypes, exclusions, and discourses imposed by hegemonic powers in her multimedia and installation works.
