Anna Bella Geiger

• Name — Anna Bella Geiger • Born — 1933 • Birthplace — Rio de Janeiro • Field — engraving, assemblage art, painting, drawing, photography. • Training — Instituto Fayga Ostrower, Rio de Janeiro. • Education — Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

Her parents were raised in Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski, Poland. They moved to Brazil ten years before her birth. Her father was a craftsman. Geiger first graduated in literature and language from Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and later in the 1950s, studied art at Rio's Instituto Fayga Ostrower. In 1950, at the age of seventeen, she participated in her first exhibition at the Salão Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro. She moved to New York in 1954 where she took classes in Art History at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, returning to Rio the following year. In 1965 she attended an engraving workshop at the Museo de Arte Moderno, where she began teaching three years later. She returned to New York in 1969 to teach at Columbia University, returning again to Rio in 1970. In the 1970s Geiger, an abstract artist, began to include representational elements into her work, and use photographic engraving, photomontage, assemblage, sculpture, and video. In the 1980s she concentrated on painting, and in the early 1990s on cartographic imagery cast in metal, and iron archive box constructions incorporating plaited metals and hot-wax painting (encaustic). Besides painting and engraving, her current work combines Installation art with video. In Rio in 2006, Geiger constructed an installation, Circe, that included a scale model of Ancient Egyptian ruins and performance video; the installation was recreated in 2009. In 1983 Geiger became a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Typus terra incognita / Anna Bella Geiger. Recorded as painter, sculptor, printmaker and photographer.