Rio de Janeiro, 1933

Anna Bella Geiger is one of the most important conceptual artists in the world and an indispensable pioneer of Brazilian art. The daughter of Polish Jewish immigrants, her trajectory is marked by an ethic of freedom and a deep awareness of the violences of history. With inventiveness and skill, she works across a wide range of languages, media, and techniques: from painting to printmaking, from collage to video, from drawing to installation, from performance to text, from photography to cartography. This multiplicity is not an accumulation, but a way of thinking in motion—an expanded grammar that turns art into a field of permanent experimentation, between the body and the world.

In the 1950s, Geiger took part in Brazil’s first abstract art exhibition, establishing herself early on as a restless, experimental artist. In the 1970s, at the height of the military dictatorship, her work became a sharp response to mechanisms of repression and censorship. Through hybrid languages—from video to performance, from maps to words—she built a critical poetics around territory, identity, and power, always in defense of autonomy and imagination as acts of resistance. She participated in the world’s first video art exhibition, placing Brazil on the early map of technological vanguards. She was also among the first Latin American artists to treat the map as a symbolic and political field, denaturalizing borders and proposing a subjective, anti-colonial geography.

Her work challenges divisions between body and nation, art and pedagogy, public and private—translating the Brazilian experience into a universal grammar of doubt and invention. Today, with works in collections such as MoMA (New York), Tate Modern (London), and the Centre Pompidou (Paris), Anna Bella Geiger is recognized as a fundamental figure in the global history of conceptual art—an artist whose ethical and poetic force continues to inspire new generations to think of freedom as form.

Over more than seven decades of intense production, Anna Bella Geiger has built a body of work that is essential for understanding the relationships among art, body, and territory in Brazil. Her practice strains modes of representation and challenges the boundaries between map and experience, concept and the sensorial. Since the 1970s, the artist has developed an ongoing reflection on the drifts of territory and the crossings between physical and human geographies, exploring zones of passage and shifting borders—what we might call geopoetics. By engaging cartographies, displacements, and limit situations, Geiger redefines space not as a fixed given, but as a field of imagination and symbolic dispute. A pioneer of hybrid languages and present in the world’s first video art exhibition, her trajectory affirms that art, by nature, is always experimental.

A Body in Space condenses this spatial thinking, pointing to its multiple layers: cartographic space and the space of the page; the social space of art and of so-called “primitive” or ancestral culture; pictorial space and the space of the image; and, finally, the space in which the body enters and exits, inscribes itself and erases itself. More recently, critical writing on Geiger has emphasized that, while her poetics engages the universality of the conceptual gesture, one of her most singular contributions is to make the female body visible in art history—with philosophical rigor and political positioning. In her hands, this body is not an object, but a subject—an agent of freedom, thought, and imagination.