Two Pioneering Women bring Abstraction to the Andes

Abstraction rapidly gained acceptance throughout Latin America in the years following World War II. Significantly, its emergence as a legitimate form of artistic expression in Ecuador and Bolivia can be attributed in part to the groundbreaking exhibitions of two pioneering women artists: Araceli Gilbert (Ecuador) and María Luisa Pacheco (Bolivia). After sojourns abroad—Gilbert to Paris and Pacheco to New York—these artists returned to their countries of origin (Pacheco only briefly) to exhibit their work, creating shock waves in an artistic landscape that was still dominated by pictorial indigenism. When Gilbert returned to Quito in 1955 she held a solo exhibition of her abstract paintings at the Museo de Arte Colonial, proclaiming abstraction’s autonomy as an art form. Six years later Pacheco exhibited her abstract canvases in La Paz at the Instituto Cultural Alemán, breaking new ground in the Bolivian capital. These two artists worked in what have been characterized as the opposite poles of abstraction, Gilbert embracing the flat planes and hard edges of geometric abstraction, and Pacheco the more flowing forms and blended colors of lyrical abstraction. This paper will explore the reception and repercussions of these pioneering exhibitions, looking at the ways in which gender shaped expectations of these artists’ work, and how these two women paved the way for further explorations of abstraction in the Andes in the 1960s.