SOFÍA BASSI + ELENA DEL RIVERO

Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible…

Virginia Woolf. A Room of One’s Own, 1929.

Sofia Bassi was born in 1913, in Ciudad Camerino Mendoza, Veracruz (Mexico). She studied Philosophy at the UNAM. In 1964 she began to paint, thus developing an artistic career of late vocation. Although her personal style is linked to a specific aspect of surrealism, typical of artists related to the Mexican context as Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) or Remedios Varo (1908-1963), Sofia Bassi was not part of this group in official or in terms and is a largely unknown painter in the context of art history. She died in 1998 in Mexico City.

Through a personal imaginary, full of hybrid beings, lost cities and fantastic creatures, her representations unfold a dreamlike universe that seems to distort time, generating her own narrative. Each painting, or each dream, is connected to a previous reverie: an interior landscape revealing that which remains both visible and hidden in the collective unconscious. In 1972, Jean Michel Cropsal defined her work as a “magical impression”. Magic reveals the fragility of reality; the intimate relationship of our daily experience with a hidden spiritual dimension.

Elena del Rivero was born in 1949 in Valencia. Her inspiration comes from everyday life and her projects are developed through relationships and connections that blur the formal limits of each piece. Her work contains a subtle tension between the material and the poetic. It is dominated by the incarnation of forgotten historical personalities, often linked to feminist positions, whose story is re-signified in relation to our present. Despite working mainly in painting and on paper, her works have a clear performative dimension, thus the act of sewing, associated with the feminine and the domestic, acquires here a symbol of resistance and reconstruction. During the last twenty years she has explored how materials acquire and transmit meaning, she is particularly interested in the healing potential of art, both spiritual and material. Through the use of gold and other precious metals in her works, del Rivero conjures the power of alchemy to transform living matter, uniting multiple times in a single work. She has lived and worked in New York since 1991.

Her first contact with Hilma af Klint’s work took place in 2005, through a group exhibition entitled New Methods of Drawing by Emma Kunz, Hilma af Klint, and Agnes Martin, which took place at the Drawing Center in New York. After this encounter, she began to develop a series that continues to this day, whose alphabetical logic alludes to the Swedish artist’s working method. Through the recovery of her figure -currently recognized as one of the pioneers of pictorial abstraction-, Elena del Rivero’s works generate an intermediate space, reaffirming the idea of the artist as a medium that marked the practice, almost mystical, of a generation of artists of the early twentieth century.

The works of Sofía Bassi and Elena del Rivero dialogue around the link between spirituality and art that marked part of the artistic development of Modernity. Their practices can be understood as alchemical processes of transmutation of ideas and intuitions into forms and matter. In these, imagination functions as the catalyst of other realities. The creation of imaginaries that go beyond the established visual order is related to a search for transcendence, to the possibility of reaching states that overflow the intelligible, circumstances in which understanding happens beyond reason. The oneiric and the fantastic creep into the everyday, which becomes unusual; a web of symbols and relationships that escape our comprehension. As Jennifer Higgie writes in The Other Side: A Journey Into Women, Art and The Spirit World: “to trust in art is to trust in mystery”. 

This impulse to dive into the unknown, using art as a medium, evidences a need to generate alternative spaces to a socially hostile context. Inhabiting a parallel world provides not only a path to new forms of knowledge, but also the possibility of forging new bonds. For many artists of the late nineteenth century spirituality was a habitable place, protected from the impassable logics of gender. For them, art was inscribed in life as a divinatory practice. From apparently distant languages, the mystical dimension of the works of Sofía Bassi and Elena del Rivero questions the dichotomy between figuration and abstraction. A visceral need to explore other formats of communication makes the symbolic, regardless of its form, become flexible. The works of these artists function as a guide: an intuitive cartography that helps us to orient ourselves in an ambiguous present; a revealing mechanism that, nevertheless, resists generating a closed vision of the world.

The work of Sofía Bassi is included in the permanent collections of Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico; Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC; Selma Lagerloff Museum in Stockholm, Sweden; Museum of Modern Art, Tel-Aviv; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Pátzcuaro, Mexico; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Morelia, Mexico and Museo de Toluca, Estado de México.

On January 3, 1968, a tragic accident caused the death of her son-in-law Count Cesare d’ Acquarone, Sofía Bassi blamed herself, and since that night she was sent to the Municipal Jail of Acapulco, Guerrero. The media scandal captivated the national and international press and the judiciary sentenced her to 11 years in prison. As a result of her artistic and philanthropic work, after four and a half years in prison, the remainder of her sentence was pardoned and she was released. During this period she painted 275 works signed E.L.C. (“en la cárcel”), two murals and the scenography for the theatrical monologue Adriano VII.
Her mural Sabiduría es Paz, commissioned by the UNAM’s Facultad de Derecho, is on view at the Biblioteca Antonio Caso. She authored several books among which stands out Prohibido pronunciar su nombre (1978).

This year marks the 25th anniversary of Sofía Bassi’s death. The exhibition also coincides with the creation of the Sofia Bassi Foundation by her direct descendants, the Diericx Trouyet family, to honor her artistic legacy. The Foundation includes more than 60 original works, as well as the archive containing photographs of 860 of her works, her exhibitions and presentations, as well as testimonials and letters, and other documents related to her work as an artist.

The TEA Espacio de las Artes Museum in Tererife, Spain, which is home to the largest collection of works by Surrealist painter Oscar Domínguez, will present her first exhibition in Spain in September 2023.

Elena del Rivero‘s recent exhibitions include Love Song, Galería Senda, Barcelona, Spain (2022); My friends and other animals IIat Travesía Cuatro, Madrid, Spain (2022); El Archivo del Polvo, Es Baluard Museu, Palma de Mallorca, Spain (2022) and Matadero Madrid (2019); Home Address: Suffrage, Henrique Faria Fine Art, New York (2020) and Tampa Museum of Art, Florida (2021), among other locations; The End of the World, Travesía Cuatro, Madrid, Spain (2019); MOTHER, Travesía Cuatro Guadalajara (2017) and My friends and Other Animals, Travesía Cuatro, Madrid, Spain (2016).

Her work is in the collections of MACBA, Barcelona, Spain; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, US; Museum of Modern Art, New York, US; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, US; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, US; Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, US; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, US; Baltimore Art Museum, Baltimore, US; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, US; Pollock Gallery at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, US; Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, US; Es Baluard Museu, Mallorca, Spain; IVAM Institut Valenciá d’Art Modern, Valencia, Spain and Reina Sofía Museum, Madrid, Spain, among others.

She was awarded a residency at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, US (2017), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Fellowship (2019), and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2020). Other major grants and prizes include, Academia Bellas Artes de España in Rome (Prix de Rome 1988), Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (1991 and 1995), Creative Capital Foundation Grant (2001), The New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (2001 and 2002), The Rockefeller Foundation Residency at The Bellagio Center, Italy (2005) and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2015).

The artist lives and works in New York since 1991.