Brígida Baltar

Brígida Baltar (Rio de Janeiro, 1959 – Rio de Janeiro, 2022) began her artistic trajectory in the 1990s with small gestures in her studio-home in the Botafogo district of Rio de Janeiro. For almost ten years, she collected materials from her private life, like drips of water from cracks in the roof or terracotta dust from the bricks in its walls. For Shelter (1996), she sculpted her own silhouette in a wall in her house and then entered it, turning the experience into a symbiotic intersection and becoming part of the house she inhabits. Her actions then moved to the outdoors, with works like Collectings, where she collected mist, dew, and sea mist, a knowingly ineffectual task of capturing the impossible. In 2005, before moving house, she collected large quantities of fine brick dust, which she went on to use in later works, resulting in drawings of the mountains and forests of Rio de Janeiro – indications of the intimate space she shares with the world. The presence of sculpture in her work emerged alongside the bricks, expanding out to other materials, like sculpture, glass, and metal.

Awards

Some collections