The sculptor Geles Cabrera (1926) takes the lead in many aspects of her artistic life. She is considered, for example, the first woman to professionally practice sculpture in Mexico. Now, at 99 years old, completed on August 2, he exhibits for the first time individually at the Museum of the Palace of Fine Arts (MPBA). In September 2024 he was awarded the Gold Fine Arts Medal in Visual Arts.
With the purpose of showing his work and connecting with the community, in 1966 he founded the Geles Cabrera Sculpture Museum, in his own house in Coyoacán, which remained open until 1990. Admission was free, Cabrera financed it with his own resources.
Few know that she was also a dancer. That’s where the title of his exhibition comes from, Geles Cabrera: Body scores, composed of around 100 pieces, including sculpture, color lithographs and photographs; The exhibition reviews more than seven decades of production, characterized by experimentation with stone, plexiglass and bronze.
On the occasion of the exhibition Geles Cabrera: Sculptural Museum, organized in 2022 by the Americas Society in New York, co-curator Tie Jojima noted: “Her dance practice and public art help illuminate her works’ exploration of the dynamics between body and space. Considered in the context of modern architecture and experimental dance, her sculptures negotiate the affective nature of the body and the city.” (The Day, 25/6/22).
Linked to the Generation of Rupture, in 1950 Cabrera collaborated with Alfonso Pallares, her morphochromophonic dance teacher, and the architect Luis Barragán, in the creation of “morphochromophony,” “an integration of color, music and movement through dance, a synesthetic experiment that is one of the forgotten episodes of the avant-garde that we seek to rescue,” wrote the architect and sculptor Pedro Reyes, curator of Geles Cabrera: First female sculptor from Mexico, exhibition held at the El Eco Experimental Museum in 2018.
Trained at the National School of San Carlos, the Academy of San Alejandro, in Havana, Cuba, and the La Esmeralda National School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving, Cabrera developed a sculptural practice that dialogues with Mesoamerican and Afro-Caribbean aesthetic traditions, as well as with methodologies linked to movement and dance.
The exhibition at the El Eco Experimental Museum surprised by the validity, freshness and finish of its pieces. From the beginning, Reyes wrote, his work attracted attention as it developed free of the hegemonic nationalist style of the time.
When speaking at the presentation of the Fine Arts Medal, Reyes considered Cabrera “a great influence for me when I understood that he threw himself into sculpture with his hands and something came out with his heart.” That is, it was not the way of the head, but of the heart. Geles, he added, has experimented his entire life, reinventing the practice; Furthermore, “she was the first woman to make her way in a territory dominated by men: the difficult expression of sculpture.” In recent years it has become international and today it is a reference for young artists.
Intention to express a world
At the same event, on behalf of the winner, her son, Rafael Cano Cabrera, stated that “creative work implies a deep intention to express one’s own world. However, when you manage to make viewers part of this world, appreciate it, that is when you obtain recognition from your peers. You know that you have done well and that it will last over time.”
The exhibition Geles Cabrera: Sculptural Museum, Organized by the Americas Society, it was the first in a series that sought to highlight the legacy of women and self-identified artists from America, with the purpose of recovering these creators who had not been studied or had been overlooked.
When Cabrera studied at La Esmeralda, sculpture was practiced almost exclusively by men; Women were even discouraged from pursuing a career in this discipline. The artist fought to make her way and had great teachers, such as Ignacio Asúnsolo, Francisco Zúñiga, Fidias Elizondo and Luis Ortiz Monasterio. “Long before Mexico received the influence of Henry Moore, Cabrera had distanced himself from realism by intuition. Although the figure remained constant in his work, his treatment has always been that of a lyrical synthesis,” wrote Reyes.
Around 1971, he formed the Gucadigo collective, an acrostic of its members: Ángela Gurría, Geles Cabrera, Juan Luis Díaz and Mathias Goeritz. The group carried out monumental works along a highway in Villahermosa, Tabasco, dated 1975, which were destroyed shortly after.
In 1949, the artist received first prize at the 31st Salon of Fine Arts in Havana; the Kiter Peter Sculpture Grand Prize at the sixth Biennial of Humor and Satire, in Gabrovo, Bulgaria, in 1985, and the Coatlicue Prize, Comu Arte, Mujeres en el Arte, México, 2011. He has been a juror for the National Prize for Sciences and Arts, but has never received it.
Geles Cabrera: Body scores It will be open to the public until April 5, 2026 at the Palacio de Bellas Artes Museum.