Bettina Brizuela
Bio
Artist and Manager
Paraguay, 1969. Lives and works in Asunción.
She studied art at the Center for Brazilian Studies with Livio Abramo, and at the Olga Blinder Institute of Higher Art at the National University of Asunción. In 2001, she received the Jacinto Rivero Award from the Faro Foundation Patronage Program for the Visual Arts. She has participated in several visual arts biennials, as well as in collective and solo exhibitions, both nationally and internationally. Her work has been featured in various publications, including magazines, catalogs, and visual arts books. Her work can be found in both private collections and cultural centers.
She was recently awarded the 2022 AICA Award (International Association of Art Critics, Paraguay) for her solo exhibition, "Now or Never," held at the Texo Foundation.
Statement
Conceptually the exhibition revolves around a bizarre family tree where I recreate a family with characters with absurd faces and with unexpected, unknown family ties or branches, incongruous consanguineous lines, by inquiring about my own family I become aware of my imperfect history, gathering portraits from the 40s photopainted in oil, they are anonymous people for me, I acquire them because their oval frame and curved glass are materials that I reuse to make a previous series of works called The Eyes, these photos that I remove from their frames I was saving, out of respect and guilt, with the aim of at some point finding them a place in this world, to amend the eviction, these individuals adopted in a tree are presented in this installation work as part of a family nucleus. The other paintings, such as the clouds, eyes, faces, and others, may seem detached from this one, but they are contemporary and have to do with each other; they make their context with ominous objects that nevertheless dialogue about the current human condition as mutant human beings.
