“Gracia Barrios” is the title of the monograph written by the art critic and curator Justo Pastor Mellado (b. 1949). This text was published in the catalogue for Gracia Barrios: Ser-Sur, the retrospective exhibition presented at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Santiago, 1995) in honor of Barrios’ half-century career as a painter. [See the biography of the artist in the ICAA Digital Archive: “Gracia Barrios y la constante humana” (doc. no. 739569) written by the journalist Faride Zerán.]
Gracia Barrios (1927–2020) was a painter of great importance to the evolution of Chilean art. She showed an early interest in art and, while still in her teens, started studying with the painter and musician Carlos Isamitt (1885–1974); when she was seventeen, she enrolled in the Escuela de Bellas Artes de la Universidad de Chile. In 1947 she joined the Grupo de Estudiantes Plásticos, a group started by art students who were unhappy with the education they were receiving; they therefore called for a renewal of the university’s teaching methods and organized gatherings where they could talk, read, discuss art, and show their works. She married the painter José Balmes (1927–2016) in 1952, an important event because working with him was a key aspect of her formal explorations. They traveled in Europe together from 1954 to 1956, showing their work and studying the art being produced at the time, an experience that helped to sharpen their criticism of the situation in Chile, which they considered to be backward. This prompted her to join Eduardo Martínez Bonati (b. 1930) and Alberto Pérez (1926–1999) in the Grupo Signo, which they started as a way to express their critical reaction to traditional painting, inspired by the political unrest of the 1960s. Though the group is usually said to have started in 1962, Zerán notes that the members showed their work together at the Biennale Internationale de la Jeune Peinture (Paris, 1961). The group was not exactly a movement since each member developed their own ideas in their works, but they did show their work as a group and shared a political approach in which art had specific meaning. [To learn more about Signo, see the following in the ICAA Digital Archive: “Presencia del Signo” (doc. no. 751514) written by Alberto Pérez, a member of the group.]
Working together, the art historians Milán Ivelic (b. 1935) and Gaspar Galaz (b. 1941) identified two periods in Signo’s production. The first was an Informalist phase during which they explored ideas associated with abstraction. The second, a Post-Informalist phase, saw them addressing different social problems, going beyond a purely visual approach to advocate a return to figuration. In terms of his philosophical interests, Pablo Oyarzún (b. 1950) places the group at the beginning of a modernizing process in Chilean art, a critical view shared by other authors such as Galaz and Ivelic, mentioned above. [Regarding the text by Oyarzún, see: “Arte en Chile de veinte, treinta años” (doc. no. 745095).]
In Mellado’s opinion, one of the major problems in Chilean art history is that Barrios’ work has never been studied in sufficient depth beyond her involvement in the Grupo Signo, thus allowing her painting to be classified under the heading of Informalism. It should be noted that Barrios described her painting (and the work of the Grupo Signo) as Informal realism, which challenged the strict boundaries of traditional painting that were in place in Chile when these artists burst onto the local art scene in the 1960s. They therefore chose not to “represent” objects in their paintings but to “present” them just as they were, in their material form. Based on this approach, Barrios distanced herself from the debate between realism and abstraction, a hackneyed view that tends to be wrongly applied to Chilean art in an attempt to transfer (in a colonial sense) the way in which international art is assessed.
