Exercise of power: the art of Ana Maria Pacheco - George Szirtes

This text traces the career of Ana Maria Pacheco, a sculptor-painter-printmaker, from her origins and education in Brazil, through her arrival in England as a British Council scholar at the Slade in 1973, and her development into one of the most renowned figurative artists of her time, with a career crowned by a residency at the National Gallery, London in 1999. The book explores the strands of the Baroque, the magical and the humane in her imagery and relates these to the culture of post-colonial Brazil as well as to the visual language of power and potency in Europe. At a time when most artists shy away from literature and myth, Pacheco meets them head on and draws sustenance from the fields of reference they provide. By following the progress of her imagination through the various media in which she works, the book reveals the scale of Pacheco's vision and highlights the streams of visual narrative that make her a unique figure; one uniting the sensibility of South America with that of Western Europe.