Artists who transformed Contemporary Art in Latin America 2

Feliza Bursztyn
Colombia (1933-1982)

Feliza Bursztyn challenged traditional methods of teaching sculpture in Colombia, re-signifying unconventional, discarded materials and granting them unprecedented value: scrap metal, car remains, and industrial waste materials were animated with movement, sound, and interaction. After studying in the United States at the Arts Students League, she moved to Paris to study with master sculptors and she returned due to a family calamity to Colombia to experiment and live in her home-workshop. She won the first prize for sculpture at the XVII National Salon in 1965. Her series Chatarras, Histéricas and her public sculptures showed an artist with a powerful conceptual and material vision, a woman who lived outside social conventions, an artist who had She became an expert in casting and handling ruined industrial material and thought about sculpture in relation to space. In 1974, in her exhibition Las Camas de ella, Bursztyn staged machines made with motors covered in colored fabrics. The vibrating and sound sculptures looked like intertwined couples and alluded to the sexual, the forbidden. A great scandal at the time. In 1980, under the application of the Security Statute, Feliza was accused and persecuted by the army in the most infamous way, forcing her into exile in Mexico and Paris until her death.

Teresa Burga
Peru (1935-2021)

Teresa Burga is a Peruvian artist who put the female body at the center of her practice. Her paintings and sculptures question feminine stereotypes and patriarchal hierarchies. She was one of the founding members of the Grupo Arte Nuevo, a Peruvian pop-conceptual avant-garde movement between 1966 and 1968, a time in which the colorful figurative paintings that functioned as parodies of the patriarchal representation of women were important. After a period in Chicago where she completed a master's degree in arts, she returned to Lima to do her more experimental work through installations, performances and drawings on newspapers where she documented the lives of Peruvian women, analyzing the stereotypes that were imposed on them and reflecting about the imaginary from which they operated.

Beatriz Gonzalez
Colombia (1938)

“I wonder why the hell the photo of the suicides in the newspaper caught my attention. Was it the grayness of the face, or was it the popular thing about two people entering into a suicide pact and joining hands for a photo they send to their families? The Sisga Suicides is one of the emblematic works of Beatriz González, for whom press photographs and media information served as raw material to define with solid chromatic blocks a body of work made of paintings, serigraphs and painting-objects. In her early work, reflection on the way in which art history reaches South American countries through low-cost reproductions was very present, reproductions that after appropriation became icons. Then came the works with scathing and direct criticism of the heroes of Colombian history, the allusion to the portraits of respectable families in the social section, the images of the red chronicles, popular prints and popular furniture. González explores people's tastes and ironically exposes their reality.

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