Vanguardistas

The survey exhibition Vanguardistas: 100 Years of Latin American Women Artists brings together, for the first time in Europe, key works by more than 70 female artists from Latin America. Spanning more than a century, the exhibition showcases internationally celebrated artists alongside those whose names are less well-known on this side of the Atlantic. Several of the works are being shown in Europe for the first time. On display are important works by artists such as Frida Kahlo, Tarsila do Amaral, Leonora Carrington, Carmen Herrera, Lygia Clark, Ana Mendieta, Cecilia Vicuña, Marta Minujín and Doris Salcedo.

The exhibition offers new insights into the art history of Latin America and explores the region’s distinct artistic languages and their significance for cultural identity and processes of (female) self-empowerment. It highlights the central role played by women artists in cultural change, social participation, and democratic developments.

Taking the early avant-garde movements of the 20th century as its starting point, the exhibition plots a path that touches on abstraction and kinetic art, on the social and artistic upheavals of the 1960s, the experience of dictatorship and resistance in the 1970s and 1980s, as reflected in political Pop Art and media art, and, finally, on contemporary artistic practices. The exhibition thus traces the development of independent artistic movements as well as their close links with the international art scene–within Latin America but also in Europe and North America.

Highcalibre international loans from major collections and museums–among them the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art in New York, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris and the Tate in London–make this exhibition a truly outstanding international cultural event.