Ana Maria Pacheco
(1943 - ) |
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multi-figure groups of sculptures carved from wood Art Work
| Name: |
Ana Maria Pacheco |
| Gender: |
Female |
| Place of Birth: |
Goiania, Brazil |
| Nationality: |
Brazilian |
| Birth: |
1943 |
| Death: |
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| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
multi-figure groups of sculptures carved from wood |
| Medium: |
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| Method: |
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| Style: |
Contemporary |
| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Sculpture
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Biography
After training and teaching at the University of Goias, Brazil, Ana Maria Pacheco was awarded a scholarship to the Stade, where her tutor was the figurative sculptor Reg Butler. Pacheco also works as a painter and printmaker. She portrays men, be-suited and blankfaced, or naked and wounded, stolid, sometimes sinister women, and acrobats, angels and amazing animals, all of whom appear to be acting out games, rituals or stories. Pacheco's representations of male oppressors and torture victims led to her inclusion in the exhibition Women's images of Men alongside Elisabeth Frink at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, in 1980. But she is also interested in the power play between women, and has drawn upon biblical accounts of Salome and Judith, and the female accomplices who instigated or aided their violence, in her work. The unsettling experience of being among Pacheco's characters, when carved in wood, is heightened by their shiny porcelain teeth and artificial eyes.
Pacheco was the first sculptor and non-European to be given a residency at London's National Gallery. Her exhibition in the winter of 1999-2000 centered on a dramatically lit group of life-size figures carved in wood and painted, entitled Dark Night of the Soul! The focus of the tableau was a naked man, kneeling, tied to a post, his body pierced with arrows, and a hood over his head. Pacheco takes up the tradition of Baroque Catholic church sculpture (in which broken limbs and wounds are depicted with gruesome realism), and the strain of fantastical Latin American art that developed out of the Spanish influence (the eighteenth-century Brazilian sculptor Alejadinho is an important precursor). These strands are combined with a simplicity of form and expressive strength signaling her knowledge of European modernism. |
Samples of Work
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