Exercise of power

the long version

Excercise of Power traces the career of Ana Maria Pacheco, a remarkable sculptor-painter-printmaker, from her origins and education in Brazil, through her arrival in England as a British Council scholar at the Slade in 1973, and her development over the next twenty-five years into one of the outstanding figurative artists of her time, crowned by her residency at the National Gallery, London in 1999. The book explores the strands of the Baroque, the magical and the humane in Pacheco's imagery and relates these to the culture of post-colonial Brazil as well as to the visual language of power and potency in Europe. At a time when most contemporary artists shy away from literature and myth, Pacheco meets them head on and draws sustenance from the fields of reference they provide. By following the progress of Pacheco's imagination through the various media in which she works, the book reveals the monumentality of the artist's vision and highlights the streams of visual narrative that make her such a unique and imposing figure, capable of uniting the sensibility of South America with that of Western Europe.