Anna Bella Geiger (89), whose work is now on display at the Frans Hals Museum, is an original pioneering artist

On the second floor of the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, you imagine yourself in a museum for cartography instead of art. World maps hang on all the walls, but the details reveal that these are not the world maps as we know them. With a card with title Local da ação (“Place of Action”) a globe floats against a dark background. Brazil seems to have been erased: like a white spot, the country stands out against the rest of the world. In another map, the largest country in South America, colored in red pencil, is placed in the center of the globe. The title: ‘Rio de Janeiro as the Cultural Center of the World’.

“This is of course meant to be ironic,” says Anna Bella Geiger (89), the Brazilian artist who made these cards. “I’m a bit of a clown sometimes.” She flew in for the opening from Rio de Janeiro, where she lives. Sometimes she leans on her walker for a while, but otherwise you hardly notice her advanced age. She comments on her work energetically. This may be ironic at times, but the drawing touches on one of her main themes: what it means to be a (female) artist in Brazil. A country in the lee of the art world, which was also isolated from the rest of the world due to years of military dictatorship.

This is her first solo exhibition in the Netherlands. Geiger only got her first solo at a later age: in 2019, when she was 86. Yet this is not a story of a female artist who is only ‘discovered’ at a later age. In Brazil, she has been one of the most beloved artists for years. She participated six times in the São Paulo Biennale and prestigious museums such as the Moma in New York and Center Pompidou in Paris also bought her work.

Yet she is an unknown name to the general public. Besides the isolation she refers to in her world maps, it probably has to do with the type of conceptual art she creates. Many works in Haarlem date from the 1970s, a period in which the idea behind a work of art was often more important than the form. You will therefore not find any spectacular crowd pullers in the Frans Hals Museum. There are mainly modest works on paper: drawings, printed postcards and small etchings. The photo collages seem to have been cut and pasted together with the help of a copy machine, some drawings seem to be torn from a school notebook.

There is also a practical reason for the cheap materials and small sizes. During the military dictatorship in Brazil (1964-1985), Geiger and her young family of four children had ‘a struggle to make ends meet’. Her husband, a Marxist intellectual, was arrested and lost his university job. Geiger continued to make art and taught a lot to support the family.

If you can see through the often sober elaboration, you will discover an original, pioneering artist. Someone who was often way ahead of her time in terms of subjects and ideas. And moreover: someone who shows that you can continue to make art with few resources, even in difficult times.

The urge to constantly reinvent himself was there from an early age, says Geiger. In 1953, when she was 20 years old, she participated in the first exhibition of abstract painting in Rio. She belonged to a small, close-knit community of pioneering abstract artists and won prizes for her paintings. After the military coup in 1964, Geiger’s work takes a drastic turn. It gets, in her own words, “bloody.” She says goodbye to the strict abstract visual language and makes watercolor paintings full of torn bodies and twisted entrails.

‘I was very much appreciated as an abstract artist,’ says Geiger, ‘but because of what was happening around me, the language of abstraction no longer felt appropriate.’ It would be too much credit for the military regime to claim that her art has changed as a result, she believes: ‘A dictatorship does not change art.’ Her ‘visceral drawings’ are, however, a metaphorical response to the violence in this period, when critics of the regime disappeared and were tortured.

The drawings and engravings with world maps that Geiger made from the 1970s onwards can also be seen as a form of implicit protest. In her new versions she focuses on South America and Africa. A small but far-reaching gesture, with which she criticizes her Eurocentric view of the world and, in some cards, also of the art world.

The themes that Anna Bella Geiger addressed with her cartography drawings fifty years ago are once again extremely topical in 2022. With maps such as ‘Rio de Janeiro as the cultural center of the world’ (1977), Geiger shows himself to be an early driver of the postcolonial debate, which is once again fully engaged in the art world.