Berta Cáccamo

Vigo 1963 - Vigo 2018

By: Beatriz Herráez

Berta Cáccamo studied at the Sant Jordi School of Fine Arts in Barcelona and spent long periods at the Cité Inernational des Arts in Paris and the Spanish Academy in Rome before returning to her native Galicia in the mid-1990s to complete a PhD at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Pontevedra, where she later taught until 2013.

She staged her first exhibitions in the 1980s at galleries including Oliva-Maro in Madrid and Alfonso Alcolea in Barcelona, and became one of the leading figures in Spain's art scene. Her exploration of the expression of abstraction in plastic arts developed gradually. Her early paintings show close links to drawing, as she worked on what critic David Barro described as ‘signs and the symbolic’, but she later evolved towards more analytical reflections, taking more interest in the process, i.e. the 'doing', and in an increasing radical economy of gesture. In 1997 Berta Cáccamo staged a major exhibition at the Doble Espacio venue at the Centre for Contemporary Art of Galicia (Santiago de Compostela), in an intervention that transformed the hall designed by Álvaro Siza at the museum, generating an illusory space where elements of the architecture of the building became confounded with those created by the artist. Almost 20 years later, the same Centre organised a retrospective of her work.

Her numerous solo exhibitions have appeared at venues including Casa da Parra (Santiago de Compostela, 2014), the Trinta Gallery (Santiago de Compostela, 2007) and the Altxerri Gallery (Donostia/San Sebastián, 2003). Her works have also been shown in collective exhibitions organised recently at the Seoane Foundation (Santiago de Compostela, 2014), the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vigo (2013) and the Patio Herreriano Museum in Valladolid (2022).