Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

Sin título (Serie) [Untitled (Series)]

Image caption
BERTA CÁCCAMO

Sin título (Serie) [Untitled (Series)]  Serie

  • 1993
  • Acrylic on paper (4 works in Collection)
  • 30 x 40 cm each
  • Cat. D_S_9
  • Acquired in 1994
By:
Beatriz Herráez

This series of sketches dates from 1994, when Berta Álvarez Cáccamo completed her time at the Spanish Academy in Rome and returned to Galicia to continue her exploration of plastic arts. They are monochrome images drawn with thick strokes on paper. She worked in this medium just as frequently as in painting. This continual recourse to drawing can be linked to process as a core notion in her work over the years, with her output seen as "doing". Her colleague Miquel Mont quotes her as saying that: 'what is done interests me far less than how it is done'.

The series of sketches in the Banco de España Collection hint at numerous themes that were to emerge in her later work, such as Spillages, in which (as the title indicates) she spills paint over flat surfaces in a controlled fashion, evoking multiple associations with the history of expressions of abstraction. Monochrome painting, action painting, dripping, and the dimension of primal gestures in the production of images are all themes that run through her oeuvre. These references function in her works as marginal notes, mitigated by a process constructed from a unique, moderated use of associations and autobiographical material. Thus, her work incorporates both the great stories she learned in her formative years as a painter and materials drawn from a 'memory of shape' inherited from and linked to contexts closer to her, forming a unique collection of images.

Beatriz Herráez

 
By:
Beatriz Herráez
Berta Cáccamo
Vigo 1963 - Vigo 2018

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).

Beatriz Herráez