Activities, exhibitions and projects

From April 12 to June 9, 2024

Following the death of Berta Cáccamo in 2018, the Berta Cáccamo Legacy was established with the aim of keeping her memory alive and disseminating her work. Alongside organizing various exhibitions, publishing books about her work, and incorporating some of her pieces into major Spanish institutions, the Legacy has cataloged and organized her work and archive. The upcoming donation of the documentary portion of the Legacy to the Museo de Pontevedra presents a unique opportunity to showcase the connections between the different records present in the archive (notebooks, diaries, journals, artist books, correspondence, photographs, and objects, among others) and her pictorial work.

Berta Cáccamo wrote and drew in an extensive number of notebooks to the extent that her artistic and vital thoughts could be reconstructed by reading her notes and reflections and observing her sketches, drawings, and diagrams. She is also the author of a series of short texts that often appear on loose papers and other agendas. This almost tactile drive for reflective writing was transferred to small objects or compositions, precarious in terms of the materials' origins and their subtle manipulation process, but enormously important for understanding her perspective on the world and things. This “poetics of the gaze” is perceived throughout the archive and its different records, as well as in the collections of photographs and slides. Her gaze tirelessly dwells on the forms and settings of nature and architecture, on objects and ethnographic structures, on craftsmanship, or simply on the instantaneous and unrepeatable traces and marks that appear to us as fleeting illuminations.

Through this intimate and experiential path, and also through the constant study of the transformations of painting throughout the 20th century, Berta Cáccamo created an extraordinarily singular and differentiated body of work. This exhibition offers a retrospective view of her extensive work and emphasizes some little-explored stages, such as the paintings she created in the second half of the 1980s in Barcelona and Galicia, just before moving to Paris and establishing the essential and mature pictorial language for which she is best known. This exhibition should be viewed not only with the distance that painting often demands but also with the close gaze of those who study and analyze the materials organized on the fifteen tables filling the central spaces of the museum's two rooms. On these tables, we will find the various materials that configure her aesthetic and vital thoughts, allowing us to establish our own correspondences and narratives.

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