Special Project - Artist Tribute: Teresa Burga

Teresa Burga (Iquitos, 1935 – Lima, 2020) is one of the most important artists of the 20th century. Since the 1960s, the artist maintained a rebellious and innovative attitude that led her to confront traditional parameters and experiment with multiple media and disciplines. Burga developed drawings, engravings, paintings, sculptures, ephemeral installations, diagrams, pieces incorporating sound, video, medical and scientific documentation, as well as numerous unclassifiable works. After her voluntary withdrawal from the artistic scene in the early 1980s, her work returned to public attention starting in 2005. Since then, Burga exhibited at important museums such as the MALBA, Hammer Museum, Tate Modern, Migros Museum, MUSAC, Art Institute of Chicago, and Ludwig Museum, and was included in the main section of the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), curated by Okwui Enwezor.

Following her passing in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this exhibition brings together for the first time different moments of her production between 1966 and 2020 to emphasize the importance of her legacy and bring it closer to younger generations. Co-founder of the Arte Nuevo group (1966-1968), during that decade Burga used pop art to reflect on public space, the body, and gender. Her trip to Chicago with a Fullbright scholarship in 1968 guided her toward conceptual art and the creation of diagrams, instructions, and multimedia works that aroused skepticism and amazement in the local context of the 1970s. Perfil de la mujer peruana (1980-1981), created alongside Marie-France Cathelat, was a reflection on the living conditions of middle-class women in Peru. In the last decade, Burga focused on drawing and developing graphic and musical projects, such as her series dedicated to Blanca Varela. The exhibition also includes magazines, books, and the main monographic catalogs dedicated to her work, published in Lima, Buenos Aires, Zurich, New York, and Hamburg.

Miguel A. López
Curator

Teresa Burga (Iquitos, 1935 – Lima, 2021) was a conceptual and multimedia artist. From 1957 to 1965, she studied painting at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. Burga held her first solo exhibition, Lima Imaginada, in 1965 at the Cultura y Libertad Gallery in Lima. From 1966 to 1968, she was a member of the Arte Nuevo group, where they promoted experimental art forms. Her work during this period embraced pop aesthetics, reflecting on mass culture, commercial images, domestic space, and gender.

In 1968, Burga enrolled in a multidisciplinary program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts in 1970. There, she became actively involved in conceptual art, developing ambitious projects that blended multimedia and cybernetic languages. Her most important exhibitions of the decade include Autorretrato. Estructura. Informe (9.6.1972) and Cuatro mensajes (1974). In 1980 and 1981, together with French psychologist Marie-France Cathelat, she developed the exhibition and book Perfil de la mujer peruana (1981).

After this experience, Burga withdrew from the art scene for over two decades due to the lack of a positive reception for her experimental approaches. Starting in 2007, her early experimental work was rediscovered through exhibitions such as La persistencia de lo efímero. Orígenes del no-objetualismo peruano: ambientaciones / happenings / arte conceptual (1965-1975), curated by Miguel A. López and Emilio Tarazona. Since then, the artist produced works combining drawing, sculpture, and installation. Her work is part of the collections of the Museo de Arte de Lima, Museo de Arte Colonial, Migros Museum, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano in Buenos Aires, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, the Sammlung Verbund Collection in Vienna, among others.