A long-needed appraisal of the abstractions, mail art and conceptual work of Anna Bella Geiger, one of postwar Brazil’s unsung pioneers

Brazilian artist Anna Bella Geiger (born 1933) was one of the first artists to engage in abstract art in Brazil, participating in the historic exhibition of Brazilian abstract art held in Rio de Janeiro in 1953. Since the 1970s she has also worked with video, conceptual art and mail art.

Native Brazil/Alien Brazil, named after her provocative political postcard series from 1976, covers the artist’s entire seven-decade career from the 1950s to the present, providing an overview of the extraordinary scope and diversity of Geiger’s work and themes, including informal abstraction, self-portraits, maps, landscapes and equations, as well as the artist’s interest in the interior of the human body, and her critiques of art systems and analyses of political and historical issues of Brazil.