Beatrix 'Trixie' Briceño
Bio
Beatrix “Trixie” Briceño (1911-1985) was an English artist who became a naturalized Panamanian citizen and was considered an avant-garde figure in the Panamanian art scene. Her style was seen as innovative in the 1960s and 1970s, as she was the first female artist in the country to produce surrealist works with a concrete aesthetic, using geometric shapes and bright colors to represent everyday and fantastical elements.
Statement
Eggs, glasses, fruits, drawers, arrows, hearts, wheels, cubes, eyes, suns, and moons inhabit tables, shelves, interiors, gardens, and architectural structures in the marvelous world of Beatrix “Trixie” Briceño (1911–1985), one of the pioneering artists of art in Panama. A life marked by early displacement, migration, and political instability shaped her aesthetic development, configuring a vital horizon in which historical time appears fractured and domestic security becomes precarious. Even so, Briceño’s works do not reflect fearfulness or an aversion to vulnerability: her boldness in experimenting with different media, techniques, aesthetics, and subjects forms a body of work in which the artist exists in a constant state of pre-programmed movement.
The insistence on order, repetition, and emotional containment reveals an intimate system that transforms the experience of uprootedness into regulated images, where the external world finds a fleeting stillness.
The forms and colors in her works reveal a carefully ordered universe, where everyday objects, abstract forms, and fragments of the body coexist within a system of their own. Surrealism—strongly present in her paintings, drawings, and collages—does not operate as a chaotic eruption of the dreamlike, but rather as a silent method for accessing the deeper layers of experience. Her images are organized like dream formations: condensations, displacements, and inversions that allow desires, memories, and emotions to slip through, creating forms that escape rational logic. The marvelous, in this sense, neither bursts forth nor imposes itself, but instead remains sustained in a delicate balance.
2.5 x 4m / 98.4 x 157 in
