The Venice Biennale’s first-ever Latin American curator, Adriano Pedrosa, chose the theme of “Foreigners Everywhere” with the clearly stated intention of platforming overlooked art from the Global South. In particular, he sought to bring to light important 20th-century modernists who had long been pushed to the sidelines by the Western-centric focus of art history. Is it finally time to, retroactively, give these innovators their moment in the spotlight?
“I thought about the Biennale quite strategically,” Pedrosa said ahead of its vernissage week in April, admitting that in some ways his ambitious exhibition concept is a “provocation,” one that is “paying a debt.”
“I don’t think I’m rewriting art history, but I am proposing to question more established narratives of art history,” he said.
In the months leading up to the Biennale’s opening, eyebrows were raised at the inclusion of an unusually high number of deceased artists in the main exhibition’s “Nucleo Storico,” or “Historic Nucleus.” After, some criticized the exhibition for a tokenistic over-emphasis on each artist’s identity, but it was undeniable that Pedrosa had put together a show of impressive breadth that introduced many visitors to artists they might never otherwise have encountered.
We picked out some standout modernists from the “Nucleo Storico: Abstraction” who have not always received the global recognition they deserved.
Zubeida Agha
Zubeida Agha, Composition (1988). Photo: Matteo de Mayda, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.
Dubbed “the grand dame of Pakistani art,” Zubeida Agha is often credited as the country’s first modernist. Born in the city of Faisalabad (then known as Lyallpur) in 1922, Agha studied under the Indian artist B.C. Sanyal and soon gained a reputation for producing challenging, semi-abstracted compositions that critics found surprising but captivating. In 1950, soon after her first solo show in Karachi, Agha moved to London to study at Saint Martin’s School of Art for one year before transferring to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. On her return to Pakistan, she exhibited regularly and helped develop the local scene as director of the Contemporary Art Gallery in Rawalpindi from 1961 to 1977. Agha died in Islamabad in 1997.
Agha’s work has often been classified as “colorist painting,” and, as well as purely geometric works, she would often borrow fragments of imagery from the real world to make compositions that resembled landscapes, figures, or objects. “I am in agony when I paint,” she once said. “It is a total mental experience… The creative act is not only an emotional activity. It is only when the emotion is seized by the intellect that the painting starts taking an artistic shape.”
Secondary sales in 2023 and 2024 are select but show a growing awareness and interest in the artist; a work on canvas sold for $35,560 at Sotheby’s New York in March this year, well exceeding its high estimate of $18,000.
Ione Saldanha
Ione Saldanha, Bamboo series, n.d. Photo: Matteo de Mayda, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.
Taking center stage in the biennale’s section dedicated to abstraction is an installation of Ione Saldanha’s Bambus, a series of hanging bamboo pole paintings from the 1960s and ’70s. The suspended vertical poles bear horizontal stripes of vibrant color to create a surprising blend of organic forms and playful, artistic interventions. Saldanha also sometimes painted long slim slats of wood originally intended for making frames. “I wanted to be free of the wall, its limits and that rectangle,” she said of these works.
“Color is what makes me paint,” Saldanha once wrote. “Neither intelligence nor reason. But something that enters through the senses: sight, smell, etc.”
Born in Brazil in 1919, Saldanha was also known for her conventional paintings on canvas, which include both kaleidoscopic, abstracted cityscapes from the 1950s and the more pared back geometric compositions that followed. It was as a teenager that she first came across the work of Henri Matisse. “I jumped on the sofa again and again,” she later recalled. “Crying, ‘That’s it! That is painting!'” She had her first solo show in the U.S. at Salon 94 in New York this spring, the gallery which now represents her estate. She died in Rio de Janeiro in 2001.
As noted in our Artnet News Pro feature “Work of the Week” from this May, her auction record was set in 2022 for one of her 1960 “Bambus” sculptures—it sold for $34,856, including fees, at the São Paulo-based auction house Bolsa de Arte.
Esther Mahlangu
Esther Mahlangu, Untitled (1990). Photo: Matteo de Mayda, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.
Though she is one of South Africa’s most celebrated artists, Esther Mahlangu has never had a major solo institutional exhibition in the West. She was born on November 11, 1935, to a family of Ndebele heritage and learned the practice of mural painting through the matrilineal line. She has since dedicated much of her life to teaching new generations of children to paint, “so that my culture doesn’t die,” she said.
Traditional Ndebele geometric patterns and painting techniques, like using a chicken feather as a brush, are central to Mahlangu’s work. She first gained international recognition when a replica of her muraled house was included in the legendary “Magiciens de la terre” show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, one of the first surveys to present work by Western and non-Western artists side-by-side rather than treating African art as an ethnographic object. Her record price was reached for the work Ndebele Abstract (2014), according to the Artnet Price Database; it sold for $112,642 last November at Artcurial.
“I was born with this gift,” Mahlangu has said. “It’s within me. It’s ancestral. That’s why I had to become great at it. It’s been a long journey of perfecting my craft and now art is within me.”
Fadjar Sidik
Fadjar Sidik, Dinamika Keruangan IX [The Dynamic of Space IX] (1974). Photo: Matteo de Mayda, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.
Known for rhythmic geometric abstractions that clearly show the influence of traditional batik techniques and patterns, Fadjar Sidik was born in Surabaya, Indonesia in 1930. In his late teens, he joined the social realist group Sanggar Pelukis Rakyat (“The People’s Painters”) and trained under one of the forefathers of Indonesian modernism, Hendra Gunawan. He continued his studies at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts in Yogyakarta in 1954 and, despite the prevailing preference for figurative art among his peers, Sidik struck out on his own to pursue abstract form. He died in 2004.
The use of simple shapes that lightly suggest figuration in The Dynamic of Space IX (1974) is characteristic of Sidik’s mature style, which he called Dinamika Keruangan. His record at auction was achieved in July 2020 for the 1987 work Space Dynamics, which sold for $21,047 at Bonhams Hong Kong.
Fahrelnissa Zeid
Fahrelnissa Zeid, Untitled (1995). Photo: Matteo de Mayda, courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.
Fahrelnissa Zeid’s canvases contain a beguiling blend of influences from Western modernism and the Islamic and Byzantine traditions. She was born Fahrinnisa Shakir Kabaagacli in Büyükada, Turkey in 1901 to a family of cultural intellects but changed her name to Fahrelnissa when she married Iraqi diplomat Prince Zeid Al-Hussein.
In 1919, Zeid was one of the very first women to attend the Istanbul Women’s Beaux Arts Academy. She continued these studies nearly ten years later under the tutelage of the Cubist artist Roger Bissière, best known for his stained glass designs. This experience helped her take a leap away from figuration towards abstraction and, in 1941, she was the only woman to join the avant-garde Turkish collective D Grubu (“Group D”) before going solo in 1945. Her 2013 painting Break of the Atom and Vegetal Life achieved a record for the artist when it sold for $2,741,000 at Christie’s Dubai in 2013. In June of this year, Le Rouge et le Noir dated between 1950 and 1959 sold for £127,400 ($162,686), way above its high estimate of £30,000 ($38,309) at Bonhams London.
“The most difficult thing is where the hell to begin with painting?” she once wrote. “After deciding on your approach, you must go forward in the physical realm, reaffirm, solidify, and shape your ideas.” In her latter years, Zeid returned to figuration and began painting portraits. She died in Amman, Jordan, in 1991.
“Foreigners Everywhere” at the Venice Biennale is open through November 24, 2024.