Figuras (Figures)

A fundamental painter and winner of the National Arts Prize in 2011, Gracia Barrios (1926-2021) tirelessly denounced Chile’s political and social problems through her art, as well as seeking to delve into the human figure and nature. Barrios was a founding member of the Signo Group, a group of artists formed in 1962 and considered by many to be the first "modern" movement in Chilean art. Barrios and her husband, fellow artist José Balmes, were exiled in France by the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and returned to Chile in the mid-1980s. "Figuras" synthesizes her work during that period, where man and his individual and collective behavior are the epicenter. Through a balance between Abstraction and Figurativism, Barrios' human bodies are, in the words of curator Ramón Castillo, "suspended images; they seem to constitute themselves just when she observes something, or perhaps when she remembers it, or even when it comes to her from the future: the hands, the faces, the bodies, the silhouette fused in the landscape."