Geles Cabrera, Pioneering Mexican Sculptor, Dies Age 100
The sculptor Geles Cabrera, best known for being Mexico’s first professional female sculptor, has passed away age 100
Geles Cabrera at Mujeres en Arte, Casa de Coahuila, Mexico City, 2013. Photo: Alejandro Linares Garcia / CC BY-SA 3.0.
Born in Mexico City in 1926, Cabrera first started exhibiting her work in her early twenties after studying at the Academia de San Carlos and the National School of Painting, Sculpture and Printmaking.
Over the next seventy years, she would revolutionise the Mexican art scene by entering a discipline overwhelmingly dominated by men. Emerging in the 1950s as part of an artistic movement called Generación la Ruptura (The Breakaway Generation), she broke away from the national realism traditions of her time to make abstract pieces that reflected on the fluidity and movement of the female form. Working with terracotta, bronze and even volcanic stone, her works often evoked the shapes of pre-Hispanic art. Throughout the course of her career, she created a unique visual language that would define Mexican modern sculpture.
Active in public life, Cabrera founded the Museo Escultorio in Mexico City in 1966, a space where emerging artists could find a place to exhibit and exchange ideas. In the last couple of years, she received Mexico’s Medalla de Oros de Bellas Artes in 2024 and her first dedicated retrospective at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City.
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